Can't have the good without the bad

My number-one hated garden task: raking the dead grass out of lawns.

The people who hire me to do it invariably call it "thatch". I am convinced that none of them have ever seen real thatch. When it's so thick that water never penetrates to the soil at all, usually one to two inches worth, then I'll grant them the term. As a technical point, no grass species other than bermuda or some more obscure grasses build thatch on this coast. And it takes years.

What bothers me the most is that the raking shouldn't be necessary. They're always people who have largish lawns, and they care about how the grass looks... but they're never willing to do what's necessary to actually help it look good. If you continue to refuse to raise the mowing height to at least three inches, won't feed it properly, and shudder at the thought of "wasting" your precious compost on the grass (heaven forfend I should even mention buying some) to top-dress it, it will continue to turn brown. You can water and water it, but without top-dressing as mulch to keep the soil from drying out, it will die on the high spots. What really makes me annoyed: raking the dead grass out removes the closest thing to mulch that poor grass has.

Go ahead, set the mowing height for your fescue lawn to two inches. I will rake it without more than a sincere objection and an offer of advice. Just don't expect me to think charitable thoughts of you while I labor in the heat and stare at your brown lawn.

I'm still fighting with the watering system for the garden. I can glue the final pieces and pressurize it, if I can get a single part. It's not a complex or obscure part. I have, however, managed to strike out three times when trying to obtain it, getting the wrong thing (it was binned wrong, marked wrong, etc.) every time. This has been five trips to the hardware store for a single run of hard pipe, and I'm getting tired of it. Maybe tomorrow I can finally beat it into submission.

Then I get to run all the 1/4" tubing, but that can be done easily, and to the things that need it most first.

The sweet corn bombed, and has more earwigs than ever in it. I'm so tempted to harvest what's edible (not much) and raze it all to the ground. What does it matter whether there are silks or not, if I can't mulch it so that the kernels don't turn out like styrofoam? The popcorn isn't as sensitive to watering fluctuations, at least, and that's what's currently in the ground. So frustrating, though.

I have to restart the popbeans, as apparently the charcoal rot is all over the garden. I've lost about a third of them already, even though more and more are getting to the flowering stages. I can grow them successfully at this latitude, but not in this garden unless I use pots.

On the good news front, all the cucurbits are thriving. That's a first. Cukes are starting to vine, winter squash are putting out tendrils, melons are putting out a leaf a day (even the Orangeglo watermelon, which I'm looking forward to), we've gotten several crooknecks even if the Costata hasn't managed a female flower yet, and the white zukes are loading up with about two squash per plant. I should have enough seed to distribute at that rate. None of the leaves have more than a couple of nibbles on them.

All eight of the sweet potatoes survived transplant, too. I hope they have enough food in that bed.

All is not lost, no matter how irritated I may seem; this garden is light-years ahead of the one two years ago, even with the issues I'm dealing with. I haven't got every aspect perfect yet, but I'm finally making progress.