Anyone following my newsletter for a bit knows I have a love-hate relationship with my garden.
Generally I follow a policy of benign neglect. Unfortunately this policy has turned malignant.
I really like gardening. But sometimes I really am bad at it.
My good intentions to stay on top of the weeding this year fell apart between relentless wildfire smoke and self-imposed book deadlines.
(One of those deadlines was to put all the Doormaker novels into audio, which finally happened this week!)
There isn’t any room whatsoever to put in some vegetables. Morning glory vines and crabgrass form an impenetrable fortress.
Yet hope springs eternal because here I am planning my fall garden.
Except the mass of overgrown weeds is so demoralizing to look at. So I’ve avoided looking.
(Of course that’s only made things worse.)
Over the last two weeks I’ve been giving myself pep talks to just…
… “get out there and pull a few weeds”
… “you can do it, I know you can”
… “focus on small steps. Even 5 minutes is better than nothing”
Ahem, none of those little talks with myself worked.
Until I remembered I HAVE A SECRET WEAPON.
Actually, I have nine secret weapons.
My voracious backyard chickens.
I do like to think of myself as relatively intelligent but it literally took weeks of dread to remember chickens love eating green things down to the soil.
So genius that I am, I immediately constructed a makeshift fence between the chicken area and my veggie garden.
A little bit of cardboard, a little bit of netting, a few sticks to prop things up and bingo!
Go chickens go. May they consume everything in sight.
(because every single green thing you see in this picture is a weed not a veggie.)
Will the human (me) come out on top? Only time will tell.
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