The crisp and fresh morning smells of RoundUp....

... and the whole thing will be tougher than expected.

I expected that I would just pull the weeds and turn the soil. No biggie, a bit of work.
The problems
1) the weeds include vines growing all over, rooted wherever they were given a chance.
2) dry stems of perennial herbs everywhere
3) wild roses between them for extra scratchiness
4) Aegopodium podagraria everywhere. Probably in layers. One of the most obnoxious weeds.
5) at parts of the plot, bits of wood all over. There is a huge walnut tree which is sort of falling apart, walnut twigs are fragile and there're bits of them in a huge layer
6) shitloads of all these
7) trash including chunks of concrete joyfully interspersed among the bushes and growths
8) bits of fence collapsed or stolen, a sort of public path recently used by a bulldozer going across the garden

I resorted to herbicides. I wouldn't be able to weed the whole place before there would be new seeds all over. RoundUp is not renowned as a nutritious skin lotion, it actually does nothing but a bit of stink and I hold hopes. There'll be quite some weeding anyway, I didn't want to kill the wild asparagus, tulips and the field of scillas. I like bulb plants, that's it.

Yesterday's plan was to clear a plot for the potatoes and use rubbish, including the particularly spiky bits, to fill the hole in the fence. And some spray-killing, obviously. I partially managed. Hole is filled with sticks and twigs and it means that another bit of land was cleared. I discovered more trash to be dealt with. My potato planting optimism was premature, though. It took me a hour to dig into the compressed soil and to pull out all the aegopodium roots, which took half of the soil volume, to clear around half a metre of land. I victoriously planted twelve potatoes; I have five kilos so there's still a lot to go.

I feel good, though. Someone commented my squat gardening agreeingly, that it's just evil to let good land go to waste.

Later on, I ranted with the neighbour (it ended in a street party but that's another story) who said that it's cool that someone takes care. And that I'm cool for starting a vegetable garden there. It felt good.

I left my ugly, Roundup soaked work gloves on the fence where mom saw them in the morning. She gave a hissy fit about my awful intolerable messiness. She dislikes my potato plantation and other gardening enterprises but she couldn't feel morally superior if she told me off for weeding so she's finding substitutes to express her disagreement. To which I respond 'Whatevs' and go laugh in the shrubbery.