Welcome to the Jungle

 As I settled down to cheer on Team USA (well someone's got to do it - the much vaunted new American love affair with soccer is conspicuous by its absence in rural western New York) it was partly an excuse not to bite the bullet and tackle the garden. After 3 week's absence, coinciding with a period of steamy heat and rain, everything has exploded into a lush green tangle of weeds and soon-to-be flowers. But mostly weeds.
  Here's one of several hundred baby sumac trees that have popped up in the flower bed I painstakingly dug out using our local master gardener's "lasagne method". This was a combination of compost, mulch and old newspapers and three weeks ago it looked great....

These weeds sportingly colonised the whisky barrel planter. Now I don't need to buy flowers for it.

Others grew up around the wheelbarrow. That, I repeat, is three weeks' growth and there was a lot more before I got the whacker out.

I sometimes wonder why we bother planting flowers. The weeds do so much better on their own.