Weeds Are a Problem

“Weeds are a problem.”  That was the opening line of an essay written by our boarder and good friend Phil when he was living with us while he completed his Master’s degree in botany.  He was struggling to find a way into the paper, and his solution, which is a tautology since a thing is called a weed only when it is perceived as a problem, did get him past the writer’s block and into the paper and eventually through his whole thesis.  And “Weeds are a problem” has become a signature phrase in our household ever since.

This year for me weeds have been a problem.  They have been present but easy to manage in the little herb and flower garden next to the walkway, but in the bigger picture, the larger environs we live in, they have been both present and often difficult.  The difficulty has been in part the fact that we have not really got to them to deal with them.  So they sprout and leaf out and flower and go to seed, taunting us with their problematic weedy presence.

One suggestion that makes sense to me is that it’s better to pull weeds after it has rained.  Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the weeds, this has been a dry season.  We did get a reasonable soaking from Hurricane Earl a couple of weeks ago, but after he passed we were too busy putting our deck furniture back, waiting for the power to come on, and clearing up debris to think of pulling weeds.  However, we did get a steady and prolonged fall of rain on Friday – I know because I was in and out of it all morning – and there was a chance the weeds would let go more easily.

So yesterday I got to it.  I weeded around my tiny asparagus plants in the bed I am working to establish and then started to reclaim a section of my old vegetable garden now overrun with goldenrod, morning glory, and bracken ferns.  It was truly satisfying yanking bunches of goldenrod out of the ground and pulling up tangles of morning glory; they did come out more easily and completely because I was pulling them out of wet ground.  The bracken fern took more digging than pulling because their roots extend under the ground and break off, but I also got clear of a small invasion of them and had a substantial area mostly clear of weeds, at least the big ones.

The other satisfying thing was clearing a part of our driveway from plantain and other small weeds that persist on growing up through its several centimetres of gravel.  For this I used a nice little forked tool from Lee Valley that allowed me to loosen the gravel and more easily pull out the offending plants; in fact, it worked so well that I now have a wheelbarrow load of them to take down to the compost pile.

There is also a not-satisfying aspect to the weeding problem, and that is the comfrey.  The image above is a small comfrey plant I dug out yesterday, and there is much that I would like to say about it and the plague of comfrey, but unfortunately most of it is unsuitable for this medium.  However, when I started to investigate comfrey [aka Ass Ear, Assear, Beinwurz (Ger), Blackwort, Boneset, Bruisewort, Consolida, Consoude (Fr), Consound, Gum Plant, Healing Herb, Knitback, Knitbone, Nipbone, Okopnik (Russ), Salsify, Schwarzwurz (Ger), Slippery Root, Wallwort, Yalluc (Saxon)], I found that there is a great deal that one can say even in a public blog; as a result, my next post is likely to be “Weeds Are a Problem – The Comfrey Story”.  It’s an interesting one and a cautionary tale.  Watch for it.