Waiting and Weeding
Jul 17th, 2009 Posted in Chris and Lise, Garden Blogs | Comments Off
So many things are on the verge. There are blooming beans and blooming zucchini and tiny green tomatoes on the vine. Our carrots are growing underground while nearby the cabbages look like giant purple roses as they start to take shape. The cucumbers are proving to be a bit slow this year but I think in two weeks we’ll be pickling cukes. And our red lettuces (from the second crop of seeds that we thinned and transplanted) are looking fine and almost ready to start eating. I hope the buttercrunch (a few weeks behind) do as well.
As our plants grow and make fruit, the grasses likewise grow. They grew between and among each carrot plant, throughout the lettuce beds, the cucumber and squash patch, and all around the herbs. They grew abundantly despite the fact that I had just fully weeded those beds a few weeks before. Grass is inexorable — it has great life spirit. Says Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine:
“It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust.”
That said, we play our role in the annual battle between man and grass. We weed. I have learned that the best way to pull a grass plant from the ground (a little one, that is) is to grasp the stem firmly but gently and gently pull it out, roots and all. This method feels slow but as soon as you speed up, you succeed only in ripping off their tops leaving roots intact and ready to send up more shoots. So slow and steady wins the race with grass weeding. And the result — weed-free beds with plenty of room for our vegetables to grow.
Knee-high by July
