Weeds! (and Other Insights from The Gazebo)

Our friends Pam and Terry had us over for Dining in the Gazebo last weekend! It was a delicious vegetarian meal of salad, personal pizzas and key lime pie dessert. The Gazebo is very charming and set in a beautiful garden, overlooking a trickling pond. (Actually their entire house is charmed with a Victorian theme; check out Pam's blog here). Surrounded by all this charm, it was impossible not to enjoy great conversation and interesting insights and observations. The topics varied widely from cats to music, social media, cats in social media, work, The Bangles (check out Terry's music blog here), feline skeletal systems, gardening and weeds!

I'm usually pretty good about pulling weeds, but this summer I stopped trying sometime back in June! Pam has also thrown in the towel. We're blaming it on the heat. This summer in Zone 5, northern Illinois, has been very warm and muggy. Luckily, most of the perennials are so full and mature that there isn't much room for the weeds to creep in, but they have found their way into other places. Places like the rock/stone border, the vegetable and herb bed, and more. There are also trees starting in the garden, that need to be pulled before they get huge.

I try to control weeds by mulching every other year (it's greener than buying mulch each year) and then adding to the mulch with shredded leaves in fall. I confess to also using Preen in my non-edible beds. It's supposed to be a combo weed inhibitor and fertilizer. It does work, but you have to reapply, and I tend to only put it down once in spring, before the beds get really full. It would be difficult to put down now.

It was also an interesting insight that perennials, while seemingly easy because they come back each year, can actually be more work than say, a vegetable bed. My vegetable bed gets tilled under every spring, weeds and all, effectively "starting from scratch" while the perennial beds are left alone to do their thing. After I till it, I plant and sow seeds, then mulch it well. I am pretty good about pulling the few weeds that crop up, because I want my vegetables to do well. Perennials get larger each year, need to split and will also tend to get weedier because they're harder to work around.

How do you control your weeds?