Things are happening fast in the Fresh Squeezed world. The new Juice Verrone novel by Bonnie Biafore and me is now available as a Kindle edition on Amazon and a print edition everywhere else. The print version will be in Amazon’s library by early next week. Of course we’d love you to buy one, or a hundred, but with the economic hard times we’re living in we know that might not be possible, and, given that you read this blog week after week, it’s doubtful that you have ninety-nine friends to give the extra copies to anyway. But you can still help. Rush down to your local library and ask them to get in the print version of Fresh Squeezed ISBN:978-0-9858195-0-7, and the Kindle edition ISBN:978-0-9858195-2-1. We get to sell a book and you get to read it for free. Ask all your friends to do the same and soon every library patron in the country will get a chance to read it.

We’ve also got Fresh Squeezed bookmarks available and you can have one for free. Just send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to: BOOKMARKS c/o Slow Toast Press, P.O. Box 4665, Rollingbay, WA 98061. Or go to www.bonnie-james.com, send us a buck, and we’ll pay for the stamp and envelope. Again some information that is no longer appropriate. That’s what the Contact menu item is for. You can also buy more; they make great stocking stuffers, trick-or-treat handouts, or cheapskate gifts for the readers you know. Get some today.

But this week, once again, I’m lost in the weeds, literally and figuratively. The micro-farm continues to raise its organic, grass-fed, razor-toothed head, and bite me in the ass. Back last winter I detailed our plans for the meadow. I beguiled you with visions of swaying wildflowers filling the west forty (square yards). I teased your palate with descriptions of scrumptious greenery, freshly harvested and eaten while still alive. (What? You vegetarians out there don’t think about this stuff?) I talked about the hard work required, made all the more worthwhile by the certain results.

What a waste of time.

The meadow is not awash in color – I take that back because greenish-brown is a color. The carefully planted rows of veggies are shorn clean off six inches above ground level by the voracious deer – at least those which have not been chewed off at ground level and left to rot by the moles and voles. The carefully tilled stripes in the meadow, the exposed loam – rich and fertile, and the hopes of a productive growing season are all choked to an untimely death by an explosive growth of weeds.

I don’t know where it went wrong.

The plan was to have these contour-following stripes of wildflowers wandering across the meadow capped with an oval shaped planting of not-so-wild flowers. However, following the tilling exercise (eight hours, 180 bucks) the existing denizens said, “Thank you very much,” and began an explosion of growth that continues unabated to this day. It seems that the already present plants considered my harrowing experience nothing more than a natural disaster to take advantage of and spread, as they say, like weeds.

Some of this was not too bad. There were lupine plants in the tilled area whose roots were all chopped to bits by the tiller. Each and every one of those little chunks sprouted in the spring and overran the area with a wash of purple and pink as they flowered. But now the flowers are gone and we are left with an thicket of lupine too dense to walk through. There are lupine stalks as big around as your wrist and the bumper crop of lupine seeds (courtesy of the bees) rattle like some reptilian warning as they are stirred by the gentle breeze.

I did manage to dig out half the six-hundred square-foot area so we could plant some sunflowers. The sunflowers are growing well but the ground beneath them is covered in a lush covering of grass and weeds despite being tilled, dug up and raked twice, and already weeded once a month ago. The little monsters just won’t quit.

So neither can we.

It’s a similar story in what’s left of the vegetable garden. There are in fact a few plants which the deer and rodents find unappealing to their refined tastes. They don’t seem to like asparagus. Onions, shallots, and garlic are off the menu. And they won’t eat herbs. So those areas must be maintained and kept weed free – or as weed free as possible – while at the same time we have to weed and replant the decimated tasty bits. So far this year we’ve pulled nearly ten cubic yards of weeds out of the various gardens and the invasive shrubbery’s growth, density, and health seem completely unaffected. Yesterday’s effort alone filled my five-gallon weed bucket twelve times. That was from an area of only sixty square feet. For every five square feet, we pulled out a packed cubic foot of things we didn’t want to be growing there. I’m sure you can imagine what that looked like. Hell, don’t imagine, it looked like this:

Meanwhile, out in the meadow, everything is going to seed. Everything that is except the hundred-plus dollars of wildflower seeds we planted in the carefully prepared stripes. We would have gotten more intentional color if we had just cut up the money and scattered it out in the field. There were a few places where some of the wildflowers actually germinated and took root. Those tiny patches looked great. But everywhere else the newly planted seeds were crowded out by the species already present, all of which were simply green. Now they’re going brown, and the only bright colors that can be seen from the meadow is the paint of the cars driving by.

Lastly there was the racetrack, so called because it looks like a track circling the weed-choked oval flower bed. The racetrack is where all the lavender plants are going to go if I ever get around to planting them. There will be one hundred lavender and heather plants out there; food for the bees and a wonderful scent filling the air.

Yeah, right.

Despite covering the racetrack with landscape cloth and about six-inches of finely-chipped bark mulch, the weeds are in complete control. Grass simply ignores the “impenetrable” fabric barrier. Blackberry shoots move as easily through packed mulch as they do through air. The racetrack needs to be weeded every two weeks, and we haven’t even planted anything in it yet.

So now it’s off to the racetrack, so to speak. It’s been a couple of weeks and even from here – sixty feet away and behind closed windows – I can hear the weeds laughing at me. Taunting me. “Outside now, sucka!” They say. “On your knees.”