AM project: removing tyfon cover crop

It was a busy day at Scaredy Cat farm.  This morning I laid down a soaker hose for my fruit bed then started the transformation of my  "weed bed."  The first task was to remove all the tyfon cover crop I planted there last fall.  Previously the bed had been covered with landscape fabric and beauty bark.  I picked tyfon as my renovation crop because it has long tap roots to break up soil and it is edible (though I wasn't brave enough to try more than a few leaves.  The bottoms are supposed to be like turnips but something seemed to have gotten to mine first -- see this January post.)

There was a lot of work to do so I enlisted all the help I could get. 

And while this looks like lots of work, it wasn't.  What started as an Indiana Jones adventure morphed into the German Army, into being farmers, into a fourth of July celebration, into pirates. (Tyfon is that easy to pull.)

The kids and their neighborhood friends did a great job.  As you can see, they razed the lot before losing interest.

Which left me with just the devastation to deal with. Unfortunately, despite the tyfon I still had a thick mat of weeds.  I started to remove them -- first individually to make sure the really bad weeds were dealt with appropriately, then with a hoe to mow down all the annuals. 

I still have work ahead of me (more hoeing and covering the area with compost), but with any luck this bed will get seeded for wildflowers as a draw for beneficial insects tomorrow.

A spring volunteer

Today is gorgeous.  Warm and sunny.  I spent most of the morning out doing spring cleaning and preparing the beds for the 6 yards of compost that arrived today.  In the process I ran into this lovely volunteer.  Not one of my picks.  Probably not the pick of our house's previous owners either.  We inherited huge, sheared boxed box hollies in this bed when we bought the house.  So this bloom is a tenacious flower with a real history.   

And I didn't weed it.  It might not fit my Pacific Northwest sense of style -- but I couldn't give up this lovely breath of spring.

More on the weeds in my garden

Turns out two of my bad weeds (and they are still bad even if useful) are edible.  I picked up a copy of Winter Gardening in the Pacific Northwest by Binda Colebrook from my local library last night and was thumbing through it this morning.  Both chickweed and dandelion were listed as vegetables.  Chickweed, unopened dandelion flowers, and blanched dandelion leaves can be added to salads -- and you can make medicinal tea from dandelion roots.  Who knew?!  Well given what a simple internet search reveals, a lot of other folks....