Sunday: Weeding

This week I have been doing something completely unrelated to ... anything. I have been pulling weeds. We had some guys come earlier in the summer and do our back yard, they landscaped it and put pachysandra on the slope along the street-side for groundcover. They said to water it but did not mention that it would get full of weeds. So by now you have a "good" plant every eight or twelve inches, and a hundred weeds in between.

There are two ways to pull weeds. You can sit or you can bend over. The way these are distributed, you can't sit or you'll sit on a good one. So you bend over. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks and ... it hurts. There is a strip about forty or fifty feet long in the back yard, along the street, and another strip outside the fence, and you start this kind of job with the knowledge that just as soon as you finish you'll have to start again.

Some of the weeds were tall when I started, those pokeweeds will turn into trees, I tell you! So the first thing I did was to go through and get the really big ones. I pull them up by the roots but sometimes they break off, so I keep a hoe handy to dig out the roots. There is a bit of a problem though if the hoe is not within reach, if you have to go get it sometimes you come back and can't remember where the roots are that you wanted to dig out. Some of the roots to these weeds, even the small ones, were as big as potatoes, obviously some of them have been chopped down and grown back repeatedly. There might be new ones in the future but the old weeds won't come back after I'm finished with them.

I remember after my first day, standing back and looking at the slope, there was a little strip of brown where you could see dirt, where I'd cleared it. I was proud of that little strip but it was discouraging too, I could not imagine weeding the whole area, it was just too much.

So weeding became a kind of personal challenge for me. You weeds aren't going to take over my backyard! Every evening after work, if I didn't have something else scheduled, I would go out with my leather gloves on and bend over and pull those buggers out of the ground, one after the other. The brown strip got wider, and then there was a time when I realized I had done nearly half of it, and it occurred to me that I could win. Until then it had been a kind of exercise, something I thought I should do but I never really expected to complete the task. But seeing some results I started to believe I could succeed.

You can't imagine how this makes a person sweat. This is August on the East Coast, people, the temperature has been get into the upper eighties, the nineties, and the humidity -- you can almost drink the air outdoors. Pulling weeds does not really require what you'd call "exertion," you only bend over and pull things up. You can't much complain about how hard it is, it's just work. But man do you sweat. I started wearing yesterday's dirty clothes when I went out, because they end up soaked as if they had been put into a tub full of water and there no use ruining reasonably clean clothes, if that makes any sense. And shorts, you have never seen me in shorts, woo hoo. There is apparently something living in the weeds called "bugs." And these bugs seem to have an appetite for something that is called "me." From the knees down I am bumpy and scabby from scratching. People have told me I should put insect repellent on my skin, or that I should put something on me to make the itching stop but it's not that bad, and I don't blame them for being hungry and wanting me to get out of their weed patch. At the front end of the slope I came across what might have been a nest of crickets, or maybe it was just a place with conditions they liked. There were a million of them. I haven't seen any crickets in the house yet but trust me, they're out there. There are also box elder bugs swarming around their home tree out front, and eventually they'll get to the house and come in under the door, but that's a different story.

Every once in a while, not often but several times, I'd reach down and pull up a clump of weeds and there would be a "good" plant in it. I tried to re-plant these, so far they all appear to be surviving, but you know, it can happen.

The best thing is when you have a single weed that covers a good amount of area. There is something here that in Arizona, where I grew up, we called Johnson grass, maybe you call it crabgrass out here but we used a different word when I was a kid. And that doesn't reflect well on crabs, which we love here in Maryland. It appears that plowing up some earth, fertilizing it, and planting something good in it is like Miss Garden getting on the phone and calling Mister Johnson Grass and asking him coyly to come do lunch sometime, and Mister Johnson Grass was never known for being real good at resisting temptation. He showed up there, and there, and over there, and he's hard to dig out. This grass grows with heavy roots, the blades extend out from a center and where they touch the ground they put down roots again to start another center. Plus the roots themselves will spread out and new connected centers will pop up nearby. Working with a trowel I can dig around a central growth of Johnson grass, loosening it carefully all around, and pull up a concentric chunk that covers several square feet of area. So in one effortful stroke you can clear a pretty good area. You hold the bunch up and shake the mud out of the roots, the point is not to destroy the whole garden but to remove the ugliness, and then the grass gets thrown in the heap with about a hundred other weeds, to go out later in a big paper bag.

A few days ago I got to a point where I thought maybe I could finish. Well, look, you don't finish, the stuff is growing while you're digging it out, there is no need for illusory wishful thinking here. But the good news is that the weeds don't grow as fast as a motivated person can remove them. I got to where it was maybe ninety percent done, the end was in sight and I went out to finish it, but it started getting dark. This was where I got into the crickets, they were hopping all over the place while I destroyed their habitat. And as it was getting dark, I also pulled out a couple of pachysandra plants, and had to pause to put them back. I got that last jungle strip down to about two yards wide, and it was getting dark, and I kept going, and ha! With the help of a half moon I got to the end of it. I hopped down the slope with my hoe, and stood and looked at it. Not bad.

The next morning I went out and looked again, and that last couple of yards really wasn't very well done, there were lots of clumps of clover left, and dandelions that I had torn the leaves off but missed the main plant. Plus there were terrible weeds growing at the top of the slope, above where the pachysandra was planted, I had left that knowing that I could go through like an avenging angel slaughtering everything in sight, pulling up handfuls of green stuff without looking at it. There was one raspberry plant up there that I decided to leave, I do like raspberries. I also left one petunia, I have no idea how that got there but it's pretty.

Yesterday I was out doing errands, and when I came home I noticed the area facing the street. The slope I had been working on goes up to a fence, and then there is a strip about a foot wide along the sidewalk where they also planted pachysandra, and same thing. The public part of our yard was as bad as the private part had been. So I put on my gloves and stood out there in a light rain while the sun went down, pulling out the big ones and digging out the Johnson grass. When I came in I was drenched with sweat again, and sore! My legs hurt, my back, my shoulders, I think the only part of me that didn't hurt was my face.

I still need to bag some of the dead stuff. We ran out of the big paper bags, and I couldn't find any in our neighborhood, so we went over to that cool hardware store in Kensington for some lawn bags, and some other things. It looks hot out there, but I will go out and finish the part by the street and bag everything else as soon as I finish writing this, and then have a shower.

I know it's growing back, I have already had to pull up a couple of big ones that sprang up in the last week. We will have a few more weeks of summer, and I'll need to keep an eye on it until it gets cool. Eventually the pachysandra will get strong and send out runners and form a solid groundcover that will not leave any opportunity, or at least any welcome, to new weeds whose seeds happen to fall on my turf.