Weeds and water. Weeds and water.

It would be one thing if we hadn't planted our cold weather crops before now and could start all over again.  This is our next door lot neighbor (if it is owned that is) that has done nothing with their garden yet...

It is quite another thing when your crops are in and growing and aren't about to start over again. Leaving you and the kids with mounds and mound of work ahead of you.

I really don't think gardening should be done this way. This is sheer torture. If we did this in our back yard we would SO not have this major of an issue but as it is this is our lot in life, literally. Talk about a tedious task. I would not wish this on anyone.

All these grasses in our beds (thanks to a fellow gardener who used grass seed wrongly) need to be removed. In order to do this we have to go through and break up the soil with our mini fork thingy and separate the weeds from the dirt. The weeds love the dirt and are really firmly rooted for being so little. It is a one by one type of task.After about 15 minutes in one section it will look like this...

Now it looks like anyone else's garden in the whole entire free world but our little lot. I am not bitter though, honest. I trust this, like all things are not outside of God's knowledge and trust that this is for good for our little gardening lives. And even though we end up spending an hour and only have this to show for it...

It is worth every minute. It is definitely teaching the boys hard manual labor and perseverance when they want to give up.

It is teaching me about sin. Weeds are definitely like sin.

1. They start off so small and tiny. They creep in unnoticed by most human eyes or minds. These grass seeds were in our beds before we planted our first crops. And the larger than life dandelion field next to our garden land with its oh-so-tiny wisps of white puffs are landing in our garden every minute and we just can hardly see them to stop them and before we know it they are in and going down and growing and until they pop up their tiny little heads, we don't know where they are.

2. They take work to get rid of. And you can't always just pull them out and wa-la, done. You have to get them down deep, get to the roots and expose the whole root. You have to let the root stay out of the ground for a while so it can actually dry out and kill the plant so that it doesn't accidentally get replanted too soon and keep growing. Any part of them left in the ground means a new place to grow and they will keep coming until officially killed.

3. They want to live. I initially thought, "Oh at least our maggot mats will keep the weeds out..."

   Nope. The weeds are working their way out, sliding across the top of the dirt, even not fully buried, trying to get out to the sun to grow bigger. They are tiny but determined and ar