A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.
—Ecclesiastes 3:2
To say I don’t have a green thumb would be understatement of the year. True, in college, I managed to not kill one of those cheap potted vines you get at the grocery store that seems to have evolved in order to spread itself across a dorm room bookshelf by mid-terms, but I’m not counting that. All I did was give it the ecological niche it was designed for. God and irregular watering did the rest.
So you won’t be surprised when I tell you that weeding the flower bed did not go well. While it no longer looks like a patch of rain forest in want of a weed eater, shoots of grass—or is that crab grass?—have come up announcing exactly how often I missed getting the roots. When I pulled—or thought I pulled—the weeds a couple of weeks ago, it had rained for most of the week, and the ground was soft, coming apart in my fingers after the first few pulls.
Now the turned over soil is packed hard, and dry, and yesterday I hardly got at a root for my trouble. I found myself hoping that luck and good intentions play a role in weeding. Maybe they have segments on that on Saturday morning gardening shows. They say plants grow better if you talk to them. Can I talk my weeds out of the flower bed?
In my non-yardwork life, though, I’ve been all about pulling weeds. And there have been so many weeds to pull! Thank God for the weeds! Bushy weeds, flowering weeds, weeds that look like grass but aren’t, and weeds that are just plain ugly and, well, weedy. Pulling weeds give me something to talk about and something to do, and not just on the weekends. It’s a project, one that’s kept me occupied for many years. You could say I’ve been a little obsessed about my weeds.
Imagine my shock when someone with more gardening wisdom than I have told me I needed to get over pulling my weeds. But I love my weeds! I know my weeds so well. I know which kinds tend to grow where, how they got there, where I’ve had success, and where I’ve had failure.
But, truth be known, if I was really that good at managing my weeds, I wouldn’t need to spend so much time on them. I wouldn’t need to manage them at all, just pull the occasional lonely weed and leave the yard be, like one of those people with good yards seems to do. I must have a weed pulling technique that yanks too hard. When I did manage to pull roots up the other day, it was slow and steady pressure. And then the one next to it would come up that much easier. No hopping around for a weed here, then a weed there. One right after the other, slowly, surely, until I’m done.
There is a more radical approach that I may have to go for, if I decide my yard is too far gone. Plow it all up and reseed. Throw in some mulch so the soil is rich and strong. Lay down some straw so the seed doesn’t blow away or run off in the rain. And water every day until it takes. It’d be more work up front—and it would look ugly for a while—but I probably wouldn’t have much weeding to do when it was all said and done. I’d have a yard full of grass, and wouldn’t that be a change?
Photo by Alesa Dam. Used under Creative Commons license.
