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Goldie's Garden

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Pests and Diseases

Identifying Garden Weeds

Before and After
Before and After

Many weed control products require basic knowledge of the type of weeds that invade our gardens. But how many of us are on a first name basis with our garden invaders? Knowing nothing more than how irritating it is to keep pulling and re-pulling and so on, I decided to do more research.

HELP ME!

If you my dear reader are an expert on weed identification, please do comment.  I’d appreciate any help with knowing what’s growing in my garden.

Although at this point I’m not 100% sure, here a list of weeds I believe to be growing in my Okinawa garden:

Possible Common Plantain

Some Kinda Clover

  • LESSER TREFOIL (aka Little Hop Clover or Yellow Suckling Clover)

Garden Weeds-6491

Dandelion Seed Head
Dandelion Seed Head - Which are still beautiful to me. Weed or No?!

My assumptions are based on our hard and heavy clay soil. Researching soil type and cross referencing pictures helped narrow down the weed results.

The problem is that we live in Okinawa, Japan.  I’m not able to find too many weeds specific to Asia.  Maybe it’s because I cannot read Kanji or that weeds are the same no matter where they grow.

Either way, it’s not a big deal, the weeds are gone now and it’s time to add compost to the soil.  Moving on…

An Update on this post:

As I am publishing and adding tags for this post I came across Flora of the RyuKyus.  At a later date I will have to research each one of these listed to see any difference between what I’ve found here and what is proven to grow in our subtropical environment.

Thank you WordPress for throwing facts in my face, after I searched for hours.  Entering in multiple word combinations and coming up short of information on weed growth in Okinawa.  (Poor key word/ tagging I suppose.)

Research and blogging is DONE for the day.  I’m heading out for some dirt digging and sunshine. 🙂

Here’s a few links I found immediately after searching for weed types and identify weeds:

Landscaping.about.com

GrowingAnything.com

GardeningKnowHow.com

All Natural and Weeding, again…

a toddlers gardening tool
2011©Jennifer Martinez

Since the last time Justice and I weeded our garden, it has been through Typhoon Songda, Tropical Storm Meari, and a weeks worth of continuous wind and rain.  Also twice per week lawn trimming which I’m assuming spreads new weeds on top of what already resides in our garden beds.

No biggie. We will pull you out again and again! 

We have decided not to use any chemicals in this first garden season.  Keeping it all natural for now.  Which could be the end of our garden due to so many pests here. I am curious how the Okinawan people tend to their plants.  (Since everyone seems to have a garden in the front yards, even the office buildings in the middle of the city have gardens!) It seems to me weeds grow alongside their flowers naturally.  Maybe that’s the way to do it.  Just let nature do its thing and see what happens.  If anyone has input I’d love to hear it.  The more I learn the better.

Daughter helping dig weeds
2011©Jennifer Martinez

We have yet to purchase our rocks.  Once we find some decent rock we will finally get to lay out the weed control paper that we bought months ago.  No point in pinning it down if the wind is just going to blow it away. Further more, there’s no sense in making the garden all super beautiful & costly if all of our flowers die in the end anyway.

Enough with that negativity. If it happens, we will simply start again. & Again…& again until we get it right! Oh, I need grandma to tell me how to grow flowers!

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