You lnkow those experiences you have where someone offers you some advce and you beleive it to be total hopspotch. More commonly known as “I know best”.
One of thos eexpereicnes happene dto me. Our family used to rent an alolotment and my mum repeatedly strummed into me the importance of hoeing. Of course I knew best, the digging, the planting, the weeding was more important. If there was time for hoeing at the end of the day, I might do some. Of course, by the end of every day I was far too exhauisted to consider picking up a hoe.
This continued for a few years, hoeing at the end of the day if there was any energy. Let’s just say that hoeing was quite sporadic!
At the start of the new season, when digging and preparing the plot for a new season of growing, I was digging over two beds. The first was easy, hardly any weeds and a pleasure to be turning over. Optimistcially I moved onto the next patch, but this was far different and took ages. Every forkful was full of weeds that took a while to remove. What was the difference?
The first bed had the brasiccas in the previous season. Cabbages, broccoli etc. Easy to hoe because the plants were well spaced out. The second bed had root veggies in the previous season, much harder to hoe because I’d sown them quite close together. This bed took a lot of manual weeding, quite therepuetic when there’s plenty of time. Clearly, the value of hoeing had proved itself. Yes a bed can be weeded, but weeding never stops the weeds growing in the first place. And removing weeds doesn’t necessariy remove the horrible roots.
The moral of the story, if you want to make life easier for yourself next year, make hoeing a priority. My advice for all interested gardeners out there, get yourself a decent hoe. And of course, make hoeing the first activity of the day, if you don’t do anything else, at least the hoeing is done and gives some satisfaction.
And the practice can be applied to general living too. It can be quite easy for little things to pop up and distract us or make us go off course. Regular ‘hoeing’ can nip these little things before they become so big they hide what we’ve actually set out to do.