I have been doing more weeding in the past few days. I hope to have the whole garden mulched in a couple more weeks. I am focusing on one bed at a time and clearing the pathways as I work my way down the garden. One of the beds that I cleared was the celery bed. It was becoming dangerously thick with all kinds of weeds that were threatening to overtake the young celery plants. As I plucked ragweed, plantains, wild geranium, clover, and various grasses from around the celery plants I came across a couple things that made me smile. One of them was a handful of onion seedlings scattered throughout the bed. I must have let some of my onions go to seed last year and they planted themselves just fine.
The other was a small multitude of earthworms I found lounging in my garden bed. When I first turned the soil in the garden it was utterly devoid of life. Over the past three years I have gradually built up the amount of organic matter in the soil. Now it is healthy enough to support a diverse soil ecosystem. I also saw all kinds of other insects moving around in the bed. With that much activity I hope I will be seeing toads moving in by summer.
I came across even more "wildlife" when I was weeding the green bean bed. It looks like I am housing a healthy population of earthworms, lady bugs, and spiders down at soil level. With all the plant cover they had I was not surprised.
This was me making progress on the green bean bed. The right side of the picture shows just how overgrown things were starting to be here, but after mercilessly pulling every green thing that was not a bean plant the whole bed took on a much more tidy appearance. Now that the weeds are getting under control, I will try to get everything mulched up so that those new friends of mine I found living among the weeds still have a safe place to call home.
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