Hi Laura--

The best way to prevent this issue is to avoid having grass grow up against the sides of your raised beds. When we install raised bed frames, we remove all sod to a foot or so away from the edges of the beds, then put down landscape fabric and a pathway material, such as crushed gravel or bark mulch. If you were to do this now, you could probably dig out some of those obnoxious roots that have worked their way into your frames. It is extremely difficult to remove grass once it’s grown up into your beds, as you’ve learned. The cardboard trick won’t really help long term because cardboard will eventually break down, plus of course the grass will just work its way in around the edges of the cardboard if you allow the grass to grow right up against the edge of the frames.

Hope that helps, and happy gardening!

--C

Yes, absolutely. We aren’t watering them at all at this point in the season.

Ugh, late blight definitely can be an issue. We usually rip out plants when we realize we have it, as there’s no way to stop it and it spreads to other, healthy plants. Worse, the longer you leave plants in place, the more likely you are to have it next year. So I would pull off the healthy green tomatoes and get those plants out of there. Do NOT put them in your compost - they’ll have to go in the trash. Green tomatoes will ripen on your kitchen counter but they’ll never have as much flavor as vine-ripened tomatoes. Try chutneys or pickles, as suggested above, or slow-roast counter-ripened tomatoes with olive oil, garlic and herbs to concentrate their flavors.

Honestly, I’ve never seen them in any of our gardens. We garden in raised beds and keep them meticulously clean, doing a major end-of-season cleanup. I read that the adult weevils over-winter in plant debris in the soil, so that could be an issue for some people. Our biggest issue with peas is this very cold, wet weather this year as well as last year. The sugar snaps have so much sugar in them, the seeds tend to rot before they germinate!

I’m sorry, but we don’t have pea weevils here, so I can’t be of much help with that one.