You know they're out of control when you set your alarm to go off early on Saturday morning, get dressed in already-dirty clothes, apply bug repellent, put on an old hat and your mud shoes and head out to the garden, which hasn't been weeded recently -- then at the sight of it, you decided to make pancakes or take a walk instead.

It's just too much. The weeds are up to my thighs, my garden a green jungle instead of the carefully defined sections I had tilled and planted earlier this year. Chaos rules. I avoided it all weekend and now the worst... more rain. I'm tempted to go out and just mow between my vegetables and then attack another item on my to-do list. I'll get to it one of these mornings, but at that moment, I felt defeated, picked a few peapods and went back inside.

At the close of a weekend trip to Onset on the Cape about 15 years ago, I noticed a load of seaweed on the beach and decided I'd like to take some home to use as a mulch for my tomatoes. It was the variety that looks like a tangled cassette tape. So I stuffed two trash bags and tossed them into the trunk. (NOTE: Use caution or garden gloves if you do this. Once while doing the same in Narragansett, something pricked my finger and I envisioned a discarded hypodermic needle, but on closer look, I found it to be nothing more than a rose stem.)

We were in a heat wave so when I got home from the Cape, the smell of the seaweed was pungent. I placed it all around the bases of my tomato plants. I don't know if the seaweed was responsible, but I had great tomatoes that year and it kept weeds down as well as any mulch would. It was very absorbent, too, unlike the straw I'd always used. In a search to identify the variety of seaweed (I was unsuccessful), I found a recipe for candied seaweed , among others. Somehow, the topic always turns back around to eating...

I use straw for mulch now because we have a rabbit. It's a great mulch, but I didn't put enough in the areas between garden sections where the weeds are now residing comfortably. Only problem with that is I have sunflowers and a few pumpkins in the garden now, too! I can't think of everything.