Cleaning up the perimeter

One of the problems I struggle with is slugs.  So in an effort to eliminate one aspect of gardening problems in the great Northwest, we are trying to use the wood chips to help on that front as well.  The pictures below are of the before, during and after of our operation on June 21st,  I am very grateful to my husband, Bill, for all his help on this project, without him and the tractor it would have been overwhelming.

These are the before pictures, as you can see, with all of our rain, it doesn't take long for the weeds to take over!!          This is two different views of the fence line.  The very green plant in the foreground of the second picture is a rosemary plant.  I was very careful to prevent it from being uprooted during the mowing part of the project!!

          As you can see we mowed the weeds and grasses as far down as we could get them.  We placed wet newspaper on the ground on one fence line, however we ran out of paper and it's one of those projects that if you don't finish it today, it'll never get done. So when we ran out of paper we just used the chips.  I'll let you know if there is a definite difference in preventing the weeds from regenerating with or without the paper.

           The wood chips are down and what a difference!! It looks so neat and clean!! You can see the rosemary plant is still there in the second picture!! I am hoping we can keep the weeds down and the slugs out but we have a ways to go! This is a 3500 square foot garden and there are still a lot of weeds to overcome.  In the actual garden where we chipped last fall, the weeds are few and come out over all quite easily. It's the outer area that is the problem at this point.  To me this indicates the chips are doing their job, I just have to get plenty of them around the outside of the garden area.

For those of you who are skeptical about the Back to Eden gardening, I hope this is helpful.  I am very excited about this adventure in gardening and hope you enjoy watching it develop. I would love feed back from any visitors to my blog.  And if you are doing this type of gardening, I'd love to hear from you about what you learned  I am going to post a few after pictures of the tomato plants and squash plants that looked so bad earlier, I just have to get out there and take the pictures!! Talk to you soon!! Jan.