Thank goodness I like to weed!! Ever since we got home from Italy I have been weeding every day it hasn't rained and I'm still not caught up. The first place I tackled was the vegetable garden. The seeds I'd planted before we left were all up but so were the weeds. Turning the area into tidy rows of carrots, Swiss chard, onions, etc. and rich weed-free soil was very satisfying. Even someone who doesn't like to weed might find the end result sight pretty gratifying.
The next weed problem I faced was the 100-foot perennial border. Weeds left to their own devices for a month can really strut their stuff! The grasses were the worst. Taller than any of the perennials, they were all ready to spread their seeds. Fortunately other weeds had little chance to do much harm as the border's flowers have filled in almost the entire bed, leaving little room for much but a few nasty thistles and some nastier vetch.
Removing thistles requires gloves, but vetch requires a trowel and perseverance, and even those two items usually aren't sufficient. Vetch has strong thready roots that like to go deep into the soil and tangle with the roots of whatever perennial their delicate vines have chosen to twine around. Actually, I've given up trying to get rid of vetch. Whenever I notice it. I just pull its twining greenery off whatever plant it's cozied up to.
Dandelions are even more difficult than vetch. They have a deliberate weak link so the taproot breaks when it's pulled. The parenchyma cells living just below the break are so versatile they can divide to form any sort of plant tissue - epidermis, xylem, phloem, etc. When they sense they've lost their head so to speak, they get to work and before you know it, not one but several new dandelions appear. Poison is the only solution, but my lawn is full of those sunny yellow heads, so I just ignore the few who wander into the garden.
By the time I'd finished weeding the border, the iris was in bloom and in desperate need of staking, what with all the rain. I hate this job as it requires leaning over, unlike pulling weeds. I weed on my knees and can do so for an hour at a time, but my bad back will put up with leaning over for about three minutes.
I finally got the iris staked and deadheaded, but put off edging the border in order to tackle more weeds. The cracks of the flagstone terrace beside the pond were sprawling with pussley and crab grass. Even the ivy around the well where the gargoyle (today's picture) sits was buried in weeds. It's always way too hot to kneel on flagstones at mid-day, so I decided to put it off until the cool of evening.
I carried my weed bucket over to the short flower border on the fence line beyond the pond. I'd made that border as a way to save the perennials that were crowding my other border. They were all boring, common flowers (the sort that spread and thrive without any help from the gardener - heliopsis, phlox, artimisia - and when I stuck them in the ground I swore to myself that I'd never bother to weed them. Of course that turned out to be a joke I laughed at each spring whenever I weeded the bed.
That silly border, however, proved to be a real eye-opener. The first summer it bloomed, I realized that when we sit on the terrace, the spot where we always sit, we see no flowers. We look at green fields, the pond, Canaan Mountain and Bob Jacquier's cows across the valley. Not a flower in sight. The beautiful border that fronts the upper sheep pasture can't be seen from the terrace.
Looking across the pond at a colorful row of blooms was a treat, and fool that I am, I decided that I needed more flowers where I could see them as I sat on the terrace. Ignoring my age and my bad back, last summer I cleared a large bank just beyond the pond and planted a combination of day lilies, Asian lilies and daffodils. I mulched it heavily, so even though I didn't look at the bed until a few weeks ago, there were very few weeds. The most prevalent one was bindweed, a wild morning glory that likes to wind around and around anything that goes up. Fortunately these weeds spent most of their efforts winding up the sticks that I'd put in to mark the Asian lilies, so in only a few hours I was ready for the next weed problem.
The bank of flowering shrubs below the pond can't be seen from the terrace, but it was blooming beautifully - a white waterfall of bridal wreath competed with the bright orange of an azalea to its right and the wine red leaves of a sand plum on its left, and the row of potentillas was showing off its yellow and white blossoms. All the shrubs were beginning to fill in so weeds would eventually not be a problem.
At least that had been my plan. Unfortunately the mulch we'd bought to keep the weeds down the first year or two was riddled with one of the most awful weeds I've ever encountered - a nightmare of horsetails (oh, I like that little pun!) Horsetails have deep roots, spread fast and are impossible to irradiate.
Last summer I got so upset with these miniature pine trees that I carefully sprayed them with Roundup and was naive enough to believe I'd killed them all. Look at today's photograph!! It reminds me of when Mickey Mouse chopped up the broom in the Sorcerer's Apprentice and all the pieces came alive and began carrying buckets of water. I guess if you never saw the movie Fantasia, you wouldn't get that comparison. Suffice it to say I have four times as many horsetails this year as last year.
They're actually quite pretty. Maybe I should give up and let them become a groundcover between the flowering shrubs. But you know what would happen - I'd end up with horsetails everywhere, in the vegetable garden, the flower gardens, a real horsetail nightmare. Guess I'd better get back to weeding!
