So Much For Vacation
For gardeners, summer vacations are best taken in the winter.
Abandoning a yard of lawn, flowers and vegetables for two weeks during the summer is not the most prudent thing to do. Mother Nature has a way of quickly reclaiming what is hers. Seemingly overnight, she can convert a formal landscape into a garden teeming with hardy, robust plants that aren’t found in the Western Sunset Garden Book.
Knowing this, husband Jim and I naturally took off the first two weeks of July. Upon our arrival home we were greeted with a lawn so tall, it could have been scythed and bailed. Weeds sprawled, climbed and towered over once-tidy beds of flowers and vegetables. With two weeks of heat and automatic sprinkling, our yard took on the look of an abandoned homestead.
No time to lose. On the second day home, I grabbed my gloves and trusty three-prong rake and set out to salvage my posies.
The first weeds to go were the tall fellows, those 3-to 4-foot giants that shade out everything growing under them. Two in particular are sowthistle (annual and spiny) and pigweed.
Most of you have probably come across sowthistle in your garden at one time or another. It is an annual with deeply cut leaves and small yellow flower clusters atop hollow stems.
The flowers almost look like dandelions, only flatter. And it’s not uncommon to see masses of aphids dining along their stems.
When the plant is young, it’s easy to pull, but when it’s mature, it’s a two-fisted tug-of-war. I have found myself tumbling over backward, holding nothing but a fist full of leaves, while fluffy flower heads spin off in the breeze to germinate somewhere else in the garden.
I have also found uprooting mature fellows around bedding plants usually means also uprooting the bedding plants. When large weeds like sowthistle compete for space with delicate summer annuals, I usually clip the weeds at ground level, leaving the roots in the ground.
Pigweed is also an annual. No matter how tall or mature this plant gets, it’s easy to pull, but if you’re pulling with bare hands, be careful of the flower.
The tiny, green flowers are tightly arranged in large, branched, spikelike terminal clusters. Clutching them with bare hands can be quite uncomfortable, as millions of tiny needles are released.
Once the big guys are dealt with, next to follow are the upright 1- to 2-foot invaders.
One of the worst weeds, yet one of the easiest to pull, is the common groundsel. This plant can flower and go to seed whether it’s 1 inch tall or 18 inches tall. Any plant that can produce seed that quickly, no matter how easy to pull, is a real nuisance.
Groundsel can be identified by its many stems, small cut leaves and small yellow flowers.
The last type of intruder is the climber or ground-hugger. I don’t know which is worse - field bindweed or catchweed.
Field bindweed begins as a mat on the ground, eventually working its way up and over and twining around anything it can - namely my delicate annuals. If patience isn’t practiced when removing it, the entire bedding plant can be ripped out of the ground along with it.
This fellow is difficult to control. When pulled, its roots break apart easily. It may look like you’ve pulled root and all, but the majority is left behind to produce new growth a few days later.
Catchweed may be easy to pull, but try getting it to let go of you. As its name implies, its sticky hairs cling to your clothes, gloves and even bare skin. It’s kind of like trying to shake off a sticky piece of gum; it just keeps moving from one finger to the other.
As I move through the garden, cleaning out the intruders, I can’t help but find many of them interesting and even quite attractive. One might wonder what it would be like if we were to simply let the weeds grow.
But that would be much too easy, wouldn’t it?
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Phyllis Stephens The Spokesman-Review