We are in a never ending battle with weeds. Mostly, I mind weeds that invade the flower beds. They take over and crowd out flowers. But sometimes I mind them, we mind them, because they are toxic monsters that are a nuisance to the entire property and beyond. And the longer we live here, the longer is the list of these invasive monster plants.
We started with a goal of eradicating honeysuckle. That plant has ruined forests and wetlands throughout Wisconsin. You need only drive along the rural roads around here to see its effects. The shrubs fill out all available space and before long, prairies and woodlands succumb to their noxiousness. Ed has been relentless at digging it out here and I think we're on top of it!
Then came garlic mustard: we've been warned to pull it out, roots and all, quickly and efficiently. It, too, destroys a forest floor (or a flower bed). We are good at pulling out the hundreds of mustard plants that sprout each spring.
Before long, we came across another warning: get rid of your dame's rocket! Looks like phlox, with its pretty purple flowers, but it's not. It is part of the mustard family and it is a menace in our wetlands. So we pull all visible dame's rocket the minute we see its flowering heads.
Not the end. Beggar's lice came next (aka Virginia stickseed). Getting the seeds out of your clothes and worse -- hair, is so awful that I waged an active campaign to eradicate all stickseed from farmette lands. This, at about the same time that Ed went after thistle plants that were invading all our meadows and prairies. We haven't eradicated either, but it's better than it was a few years back.
This summer, we also discovered the dangers of letting those tall monster wild parsnips grow in your prairie. If you want to have any prairie flowers left, you really need to pull the giant parsnip out, with gloved hands because they are toxic to your skin (to say nothing of your digestive system).
Are we done yet??? No! Yesterday, Ed asked me about a "pretty if somewhat exotic looking huge plant" that's blooming in the back of the writer's shed. I sighed. It's pokeweed and I have been trying to keep it out of here for several years now, but it's winning every single battle. It's huge, with an equally huge root and it has toxic leaves and toxic berries and it spreads like wildfire. So, add pokeweed to my list of gardening headaches.
And I'm not even going to mention the small weeds, the clovers, the dandelions, crab grasses, bindweed, dayflowers, and all those tamer creepy creeping invasives that aren't going to kill your flowers and grasses. At least not immediately. Pushy, but not deadly.
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I came across an interview with Rick Steves in the New Yorker this week. To me, he represents the best and the worst of European travel. The best, in that he works hard on convincing people to humbly choose Europe over yet another trip to Disneyworld as their vacation destination. I say humbly, because humility is not typically packed into the suitcase when we go to distant places and visit unfamiliar cultures. The worst thing about Rick Steves? Well, he is an empire. He is a Simon says of travel: one Steves suggestion and a million people are going there and doing it. For this reason alone, many of us go out of the way to avoid anything Steves has put into his Europe travel books.
In the interview though, I did come across several thoughts of his that I found worthy of a smile. For example, the idea that Europe is like a wading pool in the summer. He is right: for the overseas traveler it's a joyful place to explore without much danger and with a lot of pleasurable moments sprinkled throughout. To me, of course, the variety, concentrated into a small physical space is especially tantalizing.
And so now comes the question of when: given that Covid is not going away anytime soon, when will it feel safe to travel to this wading pool once again?
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We eat breakfast on the porch. It is an amazingly quiet day. The balance of busy followed by quiet is exquisite. The balance of staying home and getting out into the world is equally exquisite.
As I wait to see what the next weeks will bring, I go back to weeding. I mean, there are so many to pick from! So very many!
