Do you see that large white flag being waved from our house?  That’s me, surrendering to the raised garden beds that came with the house.  After spending countless hours of pulling 10 foot weed roots with no end in sight, I’ve decided to call it quits on cleaning them up.  I wrote a post a few weeks ago how I was attempting to deal with the massive weeds in the beds.  I thought I had done a pretty good job weeding each box and solarizing it to kill any weed seeds:

Six weeks later, the beds now look like this:

Notice how the black weed-shielding fabric is puffed up in the middle?  That’s because ridiculous monster-sized weeds are growing under the fabric and a layer of newspapers.  I spent about an hour trying to re-weed this box with no end in sight.  That’s when I decided all my earlier hours spent cleaning it out were a sunk cost.  To keep going forward with these raised beds, I would constantly be battling these weeds.  We had a garden consultant stop by last week for an hour to help us i.d. some plants and figure out which plants were mature and needed to be transplanted.  She said that the weeds in the raised beds were not anywhere else in the area so it’s likely they were brought in with the original soil.

At this point, I think it might be easier to demolish these boxes and build new raised beds somewhere else in our yard.  I feel a little defeated because I spent so much time trying to clean out these beds, but I’m excited for a fresh start where I won’t be constantly battling the weed problem.  Have you ever started a project around your house or yard, and then realized it just wasn’t going to work out?