A Passion for Weeding

I have a strange passion. I love to weed. This does not seem to be the case for many other gardeners. (Am I mistaken about that?) For me it's relaxing. Weeding is like meditating. No, it's like walking meditation. I don't have to sit still, which is very difficult for me, and I get some peace and quiet. Sometimes I can clear my mind. Sometimes I write stories in my head. It's a catharsis when I'm upset about something. I use the time to solve all my problems or empty my head of negative thoughts. Weeding makes me feel whole and comforted. In fact, it is probably one of my favorite things to do.

The main problem is that I don't have as much time to weed as I would like. I don't mind that when I finish weeding the yard I have to start all over again -- I don't REALLY mind. But, I would just once like to see a whole neat and tidy yard before the weeds strut their stuff again. Yesterday, I was quite pleased with a whole neat garden and today the weeds are poking through again. (How do they do that so quickly?) My other problem with weeding...well, I once had lovely long polished fingernails. I gave up trying to keep them during the summer time. In the wintertime, they spend the season recovering from their summertime trauma.

When I was young, my dad would weed wherever he went. He weeded our gardens in long sessions. He weeded on his way to the mailbox. He weeded after he went running, on his way to the pool...whenever. He not only weeded whenever. He also weeded wherever. If we were standing in a neighbor's yard and he saw a weed, he would pluck it. From what I remember we could travel 1000 miles to visit friends and my dad would start weeding their yard. I am turning into my dad. The other day I found myself apologizing to a friend for picking her weeds. Last week a friend sighed and told me that she had to go home to weed. I volunteered to help her -- only too glad to branch out to another person's weeds. It actually turned into an even greter thing than I expected. She supplied the wine for an impromptu weeding party. I highly recommend weeding with a glass of wine at hand!

I have a game I play. I have a brick path that leads around my yard. Any time I walk on this path, I must pick a weed. If I skip it one time, I must pick two weeds the next time. Is this crazy?

My favorite type of weeding is the messiest kind. I stick bare fingers deep into wet soil and yank the plant out by the root. In general, I weed with gloved hands, stooped over or on my heels. I try to bend at the knee when I can. When I bend at the waist and catch myself, I begin to wonder if I will like weeding as much if I have a bad back in ten years or so. I supposed that I could always get one of those wheeling seats for gardening, but I think that would ruin my rhythm a bit. I do not always weed a complete plot of land and move on. I twitter about. Sometimes I go for the big weeds first. Sometimes I go for obvious ones and weed multiple gardens at a time. Sometimes I pick a certain kind of weed, such as dandelions and remove all of those from the yard. Sometimes I weed a little then prune a little then go back to weeding. This year, I seem to mostly be weeding a different patch of garden each day. I'll use a hoe once in awhile, but it's not as thrilling as using my hands and the metal part of my hoe comes off the stick. ( I haven't gotten around to fixing it or buying a new one in 7 years. I don't take great care of my gardening tools, truth be told.)

Weeding by hand allows me to be closer to nature. I adore worms and this is the best way to get to know them. I can thank them for the work they do. I can really experience their expertise when my hands are in the dirt, releasing the weeds from the aerated soil. I appreciate individual plants more when I see them eye to eye. Brushing against lavender as I go is a special treat or seeing a favored plant beginning to spread itself across the garden. This is the closest I can get to the wonders of my gardens.

I wonder if others enjoy weeding as much as I do. What is your favorite way to weed and do you enjoy it?

Hiatus

I took a break...

The weeds grew in the garden. The gazebo project didn't get finished. My blotanical blogger ranking moved up. (Now how does that happen?)

I'm often afraid of letting go. I push and push and then I run out of steam. The house doesn't get cleaned. I stop writing. I don't check e-mails religiously. I don't keep track of food shopping. (We ran out of ketchup this week! UGH! That's a hard one in this house.) I feel like I'm losing control and only when I let the everyday activities slip through my fingers can I regain composure.

Why do I garden? Do I garden because I enjoy it or because I need to do it? If I don't keep up with it, the plants will turn into a jungle. My yard will be like everyone else's, even though they expect more when they come to visit because I AM a gardener. Don't they expect spectacular things from me? When I start to worry about the final result of the gardening, it isn't fun anymore. And if it isn't fun, what's the point?

We had bouts of nasty weather last week and school vacation started for my daughter two weeks ago. I didn't feel like writing, gardening or keeping my routine. I read. I even read fiction. It was such a wonderful guilty treat. Reading any kind of fiction to me is like many people's views of reading romance novels, I imagine. (I haven't read a romance novel since I was 15...not that I have anything against it.) I spend most of my time reading non-fiction - gardening books, history, biography...I've been reading Sophie Kinsella's wonderful Shopaholic series. I've played Barbies. I even baked a pie. ("What. Melissa bake?" Those who know me well may not believe it. I really do on occasion, but generally food preparation gets in the way of real life.)

I received a lovely letter in the mail yesterday telling me that my book proposal is beautiful, but this particular publisher wouldn't be able to market it properly. Last week, I attended the retirement party of a former boss -- one of my most admired bosses of all time -- and was asked by his assistant to consider taking his place. I was truly honored. Real life was knocking at the door. It was telling me that good things are ready to happen. It has finally stopped raining in NH. So, the gazebo was finished yesterday. The gardens are just about weeded...I'm refreshed...

Hiatus over.

"Hey! Who are you calling a WEED!"

I've been thinking a lot about weeds lately.

Over the winter, I bought my daughter a wildflower book. I have lovely memories of picking wildflowers with my mom. We went for long walks, picked lovely flowers and pressed them. I remember putting the flowers between sheets of paper and placing them into our huge unabridged dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannicas to flatten them. We decorated photo albums with the flowers. (As an archivist, I now know that decorating paper-based materials with living things hastens the demise of one's creations, but this isn't important to the story. I just thought I should mention it.) As a kid, I also loved searching for four leaf clovers. For the past two years, my daughter and I have sought a four-leaf clover for good luck. My album as a kid was full of them, but today I can't find a single one on my lawn, the lawns of my friends, or a public lawn. I'm sure my friends think I'm strange when I get down on hands and knees picking through clover, but one must remain forever childlike when playing in nature. I just don't care what others think about my exploits!

My wildflowers and clover are surely considered "weeds," but I love them just the same. A weed is a plant in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there are right times and places for them and we must consider their use wisely. Weeds should not be eradicated without thought. (By the way, why do we sometimes call weeds "wildflowers" and call wildflowers "weeds?")

Okay...here's a plant that most Americans would surely agree is a weed, but I have a new found love for it. The dandelion is a bane to every American lawn. In my effort to go organic, I used corn gluten on the lawn to eradicate weeds early in the season. Dandelions remain on the edges of my property. What luck! A green lawn and happy peripheral weeds. My daughter and I collected the dandelions we found and made dandelion tea with a little Melissa Officianilis (a lemony herb) mixed in. It was yummy. My daughter asked for more the next day. (To make dandelion tea, use the leaves and steep in boiling water a top on - a tea pot works great - for ten minutes.) I have read that dandelion leaves are super nutritious and lovely in salads. I will have to try this after our dandelions replenish themselves.

I am currently reading "Secrets of the Soil," which talks about the importance of weeds for aerating soil. The right weeds can even help your more favored plants thrive with one plant feeding another's needs side-by-side. This is something I plan to look into a little more. I am also reading "The Organic Lawn Care Manual" by Paul Tukey. He devotes a whole chapter to weeds and discusses how the type of weed you have on your lawn can tell you what treatment your lawn needs. (The chickweed on my lawn indicates a lack of calcium.)

So the next time you see a weed, don't pull it right away. Give it a little consideration and recognize that the weed is just another part of nature from which we can garner information and a little beauty.
***
I purchased this 'Dark Dancer' clover at the garden center last week. It is surely a weed in someone's book, but it is a treasure to me. It is full of four leaf clovers!





I found this lovely little 'weed' on the corner of my street and brought it home. It looks very much like the Brunnera flowers I paid good money for last year and I think it is a forget-me-not, another flower for which I paid a nice penny.








This chickory 'weed' tells me that my lawn needs calcium. Thanks chickory!






This 'Jacob's Ladder plant was dug out of a friend's woods. The local nursery charges $14 for it.

Weeds

I'm going to grow weeds this summer. In Gardening by Heart, Joyce McGreevy takes a chapter to extol the benefits of weeds as garden fillers and edibles. She discusses how plants generally regarded as weeds, such as the pale blue flax, sometimes have colors that are difficult to find in catalogs. She also discusses how weeds such as dandelions can be used in salads or made into teas for consumption. Many weeds help protect other plants in the garden by warding off bugs, encouraging beneficial wildlife, or offering shelter beneath their foliage for tender seedlings.

I'm going to be choosy about the weeds I let flourish. I am not a fan of violets. These thrive in my garden. I remember as a child digging them out of a neighbor's garden as an afternoon chore. Perhaps if I did not have that memory, I would favor the violet, but I forever have WEED and violet imprinted on my brain. And, despite the temptation of tasting a dandelion salad, I will not be allowing any dandelions in the yard for obvious reasons. I take my daughter to the local farm, which has a big field, to grab stems with puffy white heads that take flight when she blows on them.

To me, there are also flowers that others do not consider weeds that are weeds in my yard. The long stemmed variety of phlox are a big no-no in my gardens. There was a barrel full of blighted phlox when I moved to this home three years ago. I have been pulling out the stuff ever since. I see its tiny leaves poking out of the ground and I pounce on it. "AHA! OUT, OUT! You are not welcome here!"

I found it funny this past summer when some of the gardeners I interviewed for The Gardener's Soul ranted about ridding their gardens of weeds. The funniest part was that they knew they were ranting and found it funny themselves. I learned that some gardeners attacked the weeds with military might and deliberation. They could not stand to see the weeds in their gardens. And yet, other gardeners were perfectly fine with weeds. Gently removing ones that weren't to their tastes. Some would even leave a whole garden to the weeds for one season, knowing that they could always return to that patch of land to work it the following year. I realized last year that I had been removing "weeds" for years that if left alone they would have turned into something glorious - tomato plants to add interest to the perennial garden or Queen Anne's lace to add a delicate backdrop to my handpicked specimen plants.

Two of my big planned projects this year are to plant a wildflower garden and to introduce a clover lawn to the yard. My daughter and I began our wildflower garden last year by spreading seeds from milkweed pods. I am anxious to see if the plants come up. There is nothing more heavenly than the smell of milkweed and the sight of the monarchs they attract. There is also nothing more luxurious than the clover lawn a gardener showed me last year. (I think I'll write about clover lawns another day.) I am figuring out how I can fit weeds within my garden scheme and I'm changing my perspective about them.

My favorite local garden center Uncanoonuc Mountain Perennials offers many native plants. One great benefit is that they are easy to grow and quickly fill your garden space. Last year I got on the native plant bandwagon and purchased Joe Pye Weed. (I'm sure I have other natives in my gardens that I could name if I thought about, but these I bought with the intention of buying native.) These native plants (aka weeds) should thrive in my yard. They deserve some appreciation for that alone. If I can prize my choosy roses, why should I not prize my less fussy (better tempered?) plants as well? These natives don't demand attention, I should be proud to show them off as one would show off a well behaved child.