Weeds and dirt

Yesterday, I posted a slideshow of photos of plants and flowers that I hope you thought were nice to look at. Today I'll post pictures of weeds and dirt. You can't have the plants and flowers without dirt, and it's always a struggle to keep the weeds under control.

This is the vegetable garden plot where we've been planting tomatoes, beans, squashes, and greens since 2004. You can see how it looked when we finally pulled the tarps off the ground a couple of days ago. This year will be our 16th vegetable garden here in France. All have been reasonably successful, though there have been ups and downs. The worst year was 2007, when the summer was so rainy that weeds took over and we couldn't do much about it.

It was in 2004 that we bought the rototiller you see in this picture. When we started to dig into the very hard soil in our back yard that year, we quickly realized that we would never be able to do that kind of labor manually. A neighbor recommended we buy a pickax (a jackhammer might have been better). One of the reasons for our move out of the city (San Francisco) and into the country (Loire Valley) was that we really wanted to have a big vegetable garden, so it was important (though costly) to invest in a heavy-duty motorized tiller.

We probably should have chosen a place to live that had better soil for vegetable gardening. Being naive about the French countryside, and having always heard that the Touraine province in the Loire Valley was le jardin de la France, I figured we could take the soil for granted. Little did I know that the Touraine's gardens are mostly planted in river valleys, not on highlands like we chose. The reason a lot of grapes are grown on high ground is that grapes are one crop that will grow well in hard, rocky clay.

We've improved the soil we plant in by adding a lot of compost to it over the years, but it's still as hard as concrete when the weather is dry. And it's muddy the way only clay can be when the weather is wet. Last year, we decided to cover the vegetable garden plot with tarps for the winter, to try to keep the weeds down. Still, tenacious local plants took hold all around the edges of the tarps. Imagine how many wheelbarrow-loads of weeds I'd have pulled up if we hadn't put down tarps.