While I was hoeing alongside the Chandlers this morning I talked with the… uncle? of the couple next door who have kids around T’s age. He was mowing the field next to ours because his son has bought the place, had the front house fixed up (I noticed this winter that a dude was there fixing it up all the time and the family had moved into a single-wide trailer), and will be moving in. They have a kid T’s age, and one who’s around 3 years older. He seemed to dismiss the possibility of T and the kid playing together cuz she’s a girl. We’ll see. Though I don’t know about him playing on the roundup-ed swingset, which was installed months ago. Well, I haven’t seen anyone spraying around it in months.

He asked if I wanted him to spray the blackberries that are along the chainlink fence between our 2 properies. I told him that we’ll dig them out. He’s all, “I hate these things.” It doesn’t matter – it’s not your property. I told him that for organic (certification) I’d have to not include anything grown within 50 feet of the fence. I’m sure he doesn’t care and if we don’t deal with it first thing in the morning we’ll have a problem. I should have dealt with it today, but I didn’t get that much time outside tonight and I wanted to work on my hoeing some more. I noticed that the mattock is in the well house with the tools that I use most frequently, so that’s convenient.

After dinner, I got outside to the old strawberries and managed to pick about a half a basket. The sun had pretty much set, so we’ll see what they look like in the morning. I’m not going to deal with them now. I haven’t been eating any all week because Z tends to bring in berries that are mushy. 😦

The beans are emerging nicely. I should find the edamame seeds and pop them in. The raccoons discovered that bed last night:

If you look closely, you’ll see a lot of bindweed, some cheeseweed mallow, some grass, and maybe a wild radish. I have been waiting to weed until I am more sure if any of the flowers or herbs we planted are going to come up. I have a real problem with recognizing them in the seedling stage, though!

In other beds I’ve also got lots of (curly?) dock, redroot pigweed, still some lambsquarters, that thing that could be wild chamomile, purslaine, that thing that gets really long and woody (no idea what it is), more grass, and maybe some chickweed still. Also a few bristly oxtongue, some prickly lettuce, and another broadleaf weed whose name I always forget.

Another thing I did today was pull at some of the 5-foot-plus grass that’s starting to lean from the garlic bed into the Chandlers. I always get a cut on my hand when I do that, and I’ve got little bits of something embedded in my skin.