Ground work

I don't understand.  Why do weeds take such a short time to grow and thrive while the seeds that I care for so tenderly and carefully take their time?

I really shouldn't use the picture of the dandelion as my blog's background.  Those pretty dandelions are just one of many weeds that invade my garden every day.  I would weed the flower and vegetable beds every day and yet they keep coming back.

Some of the weeds are easy to remove, roots and all.  I always get a sense of achievement when I managed to pull them out with the roots.  But some are so hardy, the dandelion being one of them.  Their roots go so deep and so strong that I would have to dig deep and expose as much of their roots as I could before I could remove the roots.  Even then, I suspect that most times I did not remove all their roots.  That's because a new dandelion plant would grow back at the same spot a few days later.

We still have a lot of work left to do at the garden.  For now, we've only used maybe just half of the land to grow our plants.  And these plants are still so small that it doesn't look like vegetable beds.  They still look bare with tiny seedlings.  The rest of the land which has been tilled by Pete a couple of weeks ago have been slowly taken over by weeds.

The weeds are even more abundant along the border.  They are so overgrown that we had a letter from the department that leases the land to remove them.  So for next week, our to-do list is looking pretty long.  We would need to till the land and remove as much weed as we can.  Also, we would have to construct a fence and maybe plant some nice bushes along the border.  Then we would have to lay out some tiles at a corner so that we can put some chairs and maybe a small portable BBQ grill for a picnic there.  I also have more seeds that I would like to finish planting, which means we would need to finish making our raised beds.

We are newbies at the allotment and I know that we would need a lot of work to get our plot to look as good and as neat as the others.  We do have some future plans for our garden.  Pete would like to build a wind screen around that area to make it more cosy and comfortable, sort of like a patio.  And next year, after learning from our mistakes, we would like to organise the plot better to make full use of the space.  Maybe, we could construct a better looking fence with a nice gate or something. 

But for now, there's a lot of ground work to be done.  We will start tomorrow.