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?

The weather in the Boston area (as well as most of the Northeast) has been unbelievable mild this winter.  It is still technically winter today and I am sitting here typing this in a sleeveless tank top with all the windows open.  Insane.  According to my Mac weather widget, it’s going to be 80 degrees on Thursday.  I’m not complaining a bit, but it is a bit bizarre.

With all this nice weather lately, I have spent some time gardening while baby boy naps.  When we moved to our new house last fall, we inherited three large raised garden beds in our backyard.  I was thrilled as one of our criteria in looking for a house was space in the yard to have a garden.  The only problem is that these raised beds had not been touched in years and were seriously overgrown with weeds and vines.  We were so busy with unpacking and planning baby T’s first birthday party, that we did not get a chance to tackle the raised beds last autumn.

That leads us to this spring where we have started to deal with some serious overgrowth.  The one thing that we have noticed about this area is that there are some serious vines everywhere.  These vines pretty much laugh at you when you try to pull them out of the ground.  They also have thorns everywhere which makes the removal process that much trickier.  To give you an idea, here’s what one of the boxes looked like:

Here is what all three raised beds look like together:

I’ve basically just been pulling a rake through and then throwing out the dried out weeds one plant at a time.  Some of the roots are really entrenched and are hard to pull out.  I got as much pulled out as possible and then covered each box with dampened newspapers.  I then laid out black pieces of cloth over the newspapers and staked them so they would remain secured down.

I’m not sure if it will help do anything, but I’ve read this can help kill any remaining weeds in the soil.  In a few weeks, I am going to take off the cover, do some more weeding/root removal, and lay down some more compost before I start planting.

If you have a garden, what kind of spring prep work do you do?