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2003 NOMINATED AS 'THE YEAR OF THE WEED'
If each garden year has a theme, I would name 2003 as the year of the weed.
I read a story by a gardener who said she lost her garden. Her garden plot that began with such diligent planning and good intentions got lost somewhere about July amongst the weeds.
My college horticulture professor defined a weed as a flower out of place. I haven't forgotten that definition but some weeds don't live up to the flower compliment, in my opinion.
My most pervasive weed problems this year are jewelweed and lambsquarter.
Jewelweed is actually a rather nice plant. It is an annual that grows up to three feet tall and has smooth, oval leaves on tubular stems that grow to more than 1-inch thick at maturity. A member of the impatiens family, its stems are brittle and loaded with liquid.
Its trumpet-shaped yellow flowers hang from the plant much as a jewel from a necklace. The seeds "pop" when touched, giving rise to the plant's other name, touch-me-not.
The problem with jewelweed is that it eventually grows everywhere. I don't think jewelweed was present on my property when I moved here 11 years ago. I first noticed it a half-dozen years ago in the shade of my back yard. Like most weeds, it probably hitchhiked here in the soil of some other plant I bought or transplanted or got deposited in bird droppings. Jewelweed thrives in moist, shady areas, which I have in abundance.
In its defense, jewelweed is a natural remedy and preventative for poison ivy and many other skin disorders. Results of one study showed dramatic results in 95% of people who used a jewelweed tincture for poison ivy rash. Jewelweed works by counter-reacting with the chemicals in other plants that cause irritation. When you are out in the field and find you have been exposed to poison ivy or stinging nettle you can reach for the jewelweed plant and slice the stem, then rub its juicy inside on exposed parts. This application will reportedly ease irritation and prevent breakout.
The lambsquarter got smuggled into my garden hidden in bags of composted sheep manure. Each spring I mix soil for containers and transplanting by blending sterilized topsoil, peat moss and composted sheep manure.
This year, every container I planted, along with plants placed in garden beds, have robust crops of tiny lambsquarter seedlings. The seedlings are easy to pluck out of the containers by hand but it's a nuisance.
I've just learned the name of another weed I've been fighting in recent years. It grows in shade under other plants. An internet search helped me identify this weed as Galium aparine, with a curious common name catchweed bedstraw. Catchweed is a tangling plant that can grow to 80 inches long. The leaves are narrow and are in a whorled arrangement around the stem. Leaves and stems are very rough to the touch due to the presence of short, stiff hairs that make the plant attach to clothing and animal fur. The description said catchweed is a serious problem weed in cultivated fields, particularly in hay or grain.
If I were to create a deck of cards featuring the faces of my 52 biggest weed enemies, wild raspberry would be one of the aces. Year after year it shows up everywhere. It does little good to pull up the new shoots because they are attached to a vigorous underground root system that sends up thorny new raspberry plants a few days later. I could lose my gardens to wild raspberry in one growing season if I didn't keep at the chore of uprooting this menace.
The problem with most weeds is that they grow right amongst all the desirable flowers and vegetables, prohibiting tidy control with chemicals. Getting rid of weeds, in most cases, requires hoeing or, in really tight spaces, pulling individual stems. On a cool, breezy day, pulling weed seedlings isn't too bad a job. But -- and this is not news to gardeners -- it is no fun at all when the air is hot and still and the mosquitoes are swarming in search of their next blood meal.
The flower-out-of-place definition is appropriate for some weeds. Wild violet and Virginia creeper, for example, grow everywhere on my acre and a half. I have learned to accept them as one learns to accept a facial scar or chronic limp.
One reason weeds are so hard to control is because they're so darn old. Weeds are among the oldest living organisms and they didn't get that way by being stupid. A Canadian botanist successfully propagated Arctic lupine from 10,000-year-old seeds that had been frozen in silt in Canada's Yukon Territory. In another study, a Michigan scientist mixed weeds seeds with sand in a milk bottle and buried the bottle, bottle mouth downward, in 1879. Some of the seeds sprouted when planted 100 years later.
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