The French Country Challenge

A quick tour

A recent quick tour of the veggie garden reveled chaos. 

I guess that is what a week plus of pretending it isn't there will do to it.

My once really nice rows of plants are being overtaken with weeds, and I need to find a solution rather quickly.  I am actually considering buying some of that black cloth stuff to cover up my ground with, because I can't seem to find the time to weed as much as I would need to.  I think another possibility would be to buy a bale of hay and spread it all around, hopefully snuffing out the weeds as well as maintaining some moisture in the soil in the process...  Anyone have and ideas/opinions on what is best?  I am kind of leaning towards the hay because it will just decompose into the soil eventually, but I am not sure what is best in regards to keeping the weeds at bay. 

I wanted to finish my planting today, late I know (!), but the weeds are so intense, that I need to do some serious work out there before anything else can be planted.  The good news is that my lettuces are looking great through the weeds and so are my tomato plants. 

After a beautiful day yesterday, with temperatures in the 90's, it is raining again today.  Which would be great, if I had a clean weeded plot!  We spent yesterday at a birthday party for two little girls way over on the other side of Paris.  We had a lot of fun, and it was nice to see some people that we only see once a year.  Besides the kids we are the only people who change year after year.  Last year I was pregnant, this year we have a baby.  Hopefully next year we will be pregnant again, or thinking about it.  All the adults are the same from year to year more or less.  A gay couple (the godfathers of one of the girls, I love how the French are really open to this sort of thing), two eternally single women, the parents of the girls, and another Franco-British family.  This gathering has turned into one of my favorite meetings of the year...  Now anyways, I am off to weed some in-between rain clouds, and I look forward to any feedback on my weed situation!

And a few pictures from a festival that we went to last year and hopefully we will go to again this year!  We had a lot of fun, if anyone is in the Seine and Marne, look up the

Les Médiévales de Provins

Cabbage conundrum

A few posts ago, I remarked on the rapidly advancing growth of the savoy cabbages.  While this is wonderful to behold, they are actually already elbowing each other for room, not to mention blocking all sunlight from reaching the little baby lettuces my neighbor got springing up in his garden and which we stuck on the end of the rows interspersed, as we erroneously thought we had started the savoy cabbage line a little too far over and were wasting precious space.

So the thought occurred to me, and I pose the question to you dear knowledgeable readers...is it possible to harvest the outer leaves of savoy cabbage as it grows in the same manner as one does with swiss chard for instance?  Thus giving each plant some more breathing room while also giving us a steady supply of cabbage?

Would this: have an effect of slowing growth, speeding up growth?  Potentially damage the plant? Prevent the actual cabbage head from forming properly? (If the latter is true, is it then possible to harvest the outer leaves once the head has formed?)  Have strange and horrendous implications unfathomable to my novice gardener's mind?  Is it possible but not recommended simply because the leaves wouldn't taste very good at this stage? 

Thanks in advance everyone for your help!