Bill Dogterom
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Spectacular Weeds
Well, its that time of year again. Time for my occasional reflection on the plight of the modern home-owner. As always, it follows a couple of weeks of effort in the yard as we have struggled mightily to rid the land of the curse of Adam. Yes, I am talking about weeds. There is probably more to the curse of Adam than that, but for right now, weeds are about all I can see.
What drew my attention was the spectacular varieties that boldly try and pass themselves off as small trees, blending in with the rest of the landscape until the last minute when they release their toxic puff-balls into the innocent air. Those ones are easy to deal with. Most of them have either a shallow root structure and are anchored to the ground like Gulliver was by the Lilliputians, or they have a single tap root. In either case, a loosening of the dirt (I won’t call what we have in our yard “soil”) is all it takes to dispatch them to their just reward. There is something deeply gratifying about watching the big ones fall.
This year, however, I have been on my knees dealing with a particularly obnoxious infestation in my lawn. And I am not talking about prayer – although there were times when it came to that. The Marathon sod I laid a couple of years ago has become a multi-ethnic community of bermuda grass, oxalis, dandelion, winter-rye, and, as a carefully placed advertising door-hanger indicated, the omnipresent “other weeds.” These invaders have driven me to looking longingly at the rockscapes of the desert! I have been out there, night after night, day fading into dusk, digging these vegetative vermin out, leaving large holes and brown spots in place of the rich green that, from a distance, looked like lawn.
It is no simple matter to get rid of these things. They have wrapped themselves around the grass roots and have sent out runners weaving their way half a foot or more from their alien mother. And after hours of back breaking labor, a trip the next morning to survey the results produces the horrifying observation that as many were missed as removed!
Archives
June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 March 2006
