Update on the patio: crabgrass and thyme

My sister is here for a visit, and I've gotten behind all around. I've been wanting to post these photos of the patio crabgrass and thyme, which are now already out of date. But to bring you up to speed, the crabgrass and I are about even this summer. He is not winning. But neither am I. I make onslaughts. He keeps up a steady pace. It is a classic case of the tortoise and the hare. Well, but crabgrass is like a tortoise-hare monstrosity, ... and I am a human, last time I checked anyway. It's really not fair.

To catch up, my last full post is here. A brief post from July outlining the additional new varieties of thyme and other stuff I put in this summer is here.

So, these photos are actually from a few weeks ago. The crabgrass had gotten tall in places, especially under the bench. Here's a photo of most of the patio. I am afraid that this photo was taken AFTER I'd done most of the weeding!

Close up under the bench, before:

Even in the most shady corner, crabgrass, oh so happy:

So I weeded all that by hand ...

I spent a couple of weekends out on the patio (not whole days), maybe 4 days, 2-3 hours at a stretch. And I got about half of the patio weeded. Here:

 

Here, by the patio pots:

But there is a vast stretch on the left-hand side that I didn't get to. It's a bit of a wild west out there:

I'm trying to keep ahead of the weeds in the vicinity of all my little thyme envoys. So here is the wooly thyme. It's grown quite a bit.

Here is some elfin thyme that I planted last August. It grows very slowly, but keeps to the space between the bricks.

Here are two more bits of elfin thyme:

Here is the first little fleet of mint thyme that I put in last summer ...

Here is what that same grouping looked like a year ago ...

Here is some pink chintz thyme I just put in. It is growing very rapidly ...

Here's another thyme. I actually can't recall which one this is:

And last, the Corsican Mint (not a thyme variety), which likes damp and slightly shady spots. It's doing better than I thought it would, especially considering that late June and early July were deathly hot and dry. I watered it a few times, but not more than once a week, and it seems happy ...

But alas, I haven't gotten any weeding done since late July, and the patio is once again totally out of control ... still more to come.