When I mentally list the things that I like to do, gardening is one of them. And yet I’ve barely done anything in the garden this season. Just like I think of walking and hiking as one of my hobbies, and I’ve done almost no walking this past year. I don’t know where all my time and energy goes.

Today, in any case, I spent much of my free time in the garden. I cleared out a whole lot of weeds from the area I planted with bushes in June, and shovelled out all the soil from two of our planters with strawberries. Or rather, the planters that used to have strawberries but that have since been overrun with a particularly obnoxious weed that is impossible to get rid of because its stalks and roots near the surface are thread-thin and just break when you try to pull them out, leaving behind a well-buried rhizome that soon sends out new shoots. So I’m giving up on those two boxes and will start over with stronger geotextile, fresh soil and new plants.