On Weeds and Life

Tonight, we watched a DVD about Pete Seeger's life.  It was touching, inspiring, filled with good thoughts, good ideas, good ideals, and also good music.  He is a lesson for us all, although I doubt if many of us would be able to take the equivalent of being blacklisted for 17 years as well as he did.  I met him once, years ago in Los Angeles, when I was doing publicity for a folk music club that was sponsoring one of his concerts.  I had dinner with him the night before the concert, along with a dozen other people.  He was charismatic even over dinner. 

And now he must be close to 90 years old, and seems as strong and lively and filled with hope as ever.  Good for him.  For myself, not so strong and lively and filled with hope, I think, but this may largely be a result of the remarkable heat we have had for the past three days.  I can't complain too much, because it didn't even get to be 90 degrees (although it was 88 in the house), and the 'heat wave' lasted only for three days (tomorrow it's supposed to be back to 67 degrees).  But, I did notice that every day of extra warmth produced about a ton more bindweed blooming in the more difficult places to reach in my yard.

A friend says that we are lucky to be living in a place where even the worst weeds are beautiful.  This seems to me to be the wrong message: if they're so beautiful, why am I trying to get rid of them?  And the answer is because there will be nothing out there BUT bindweed if I don't keep at the task.

This summer, grandchildren have been around quite a bit.  Both the grandchildren and their parents have been more than happy to help us with the many bits of work that need always to be done, but no one is very anxious to help with weeding, I find.  In fact, I saw in my 13-y/o granddaughter's eyes, as she watched me weeding, weeding, the conviction that I was nuts.  After all, the thing is, I pull them up, and then they grow back next year.  Don't I see that this is going nowhere? 

Well, to everything there is a season and also a time for every purpose under heaven.  And in this season, my purpose is to pull up those bindweeds, even though their roots may stretch lo unto many feet in length and even though they will return next year.  Did Seeger give up just because wars keep occurring?.  I think Pete Seeger would, if not admire my dedication, at least recognize a similarity between us with respect to sticking to one's view of what is the right thing to do, even though others might think it foolish or even wrong.  His life has been spent encouraging peace and harmony and group singing and generosity and compassion.  At the moment, mine feels like it has been spent at war with crab grass and its fellow noxious weeds, bindweed being only one of the latest in a long line.  Maybe tomorrow, out in the fields of bindweed, I'll try singing 'We Shall Overcome."

Good Neighbors

Robert Frost advised us that ‘good fences make good neighbors,’ but I beg to differ. I have fences on three sides of my property and it turns out that judging the neighbors is not so easy, even when I consider myself one of the neighbors, which I am, of course, since I'm their neighbor. It turns out that I’m one of the bad ones, despite an excellent fence. In this particular situation, the nature of the neighbors is deeply affected by whether they have a truly noxious weed that they are making available to those who are nearest, if not necessarily dearest, to them.

Bad neighbor that I am, it is because I have bindweed on my property and it is escaping to the neighbor to the north. I have been working on eradicating the bindweed (a class B noxious weed) for over eight years. It is one tough customer. It has roots that run very deep and up to six feet long. They may be forty feet long for all I know, but the longest one I ever dug up was about six feet. Usually, they break off before I get more than a foot or two. Bindweed is also called wild morning glory. It is a white convolvulus and looks just like a small morning glory that goes on forever. Its root survives everything. There are stories of uprooted bindweed left on a piece of board in the sun that, weeks later was still willing to put out roots when placed in a moist environment. My own weak attempt at a solution is to put roots, flower, and stems all in a large black plastic bag which I close and leave in the sun for a few weeks or months until we are burning garden debris that can’t/shouldn’t be composted. Then I empty the bag’s contents on the hot fire. I think it’s dead at that point. I can't be sure, though; it's possible that what I have created is powdered bindweed (mix with water and...).

But still, despite eight years of steady and industrious work, I still have some bindweed, mostly in the center of our property where it is harming only me. But a new front has opened up on the northern edge and I am struggling to contain it before it moves through the chainlink fence to the neighbors’ immaculately groomed yard. Fortunately, there is a considerable expanse of paved driveway that it must make it across--after the fence--before it can become well established in their yard. Unless, of course, it goes under the concrete, which means that they will have it for eight years or forever. Distressing. I can hardly face them and it doesn’t help that they don’t speak a lot of English and I of course (a good American!) speak none of their language. The complexities of my apologies may not get through, I fear; perhaps not even what it is that I am apologizing for. When I crouch by the fence uprooting handfuls of bindweed, they look sympathetically at me, while I feel sympathy for them...but what to say?

On the other hand, my neighbors to the west have for years been feeding bindweed on to my property and I have not yet responded by threatening to set their house on fire or calling the Washington State Noxious Weed Authority. It is a rented house and the California owners have tended to rent to people who have reached the age of majority but not the age of either good sense or good neighborliness. Mostly, they have reached the age of loud music on weekend nights, the pulsing bass still felt long after the more ‘melodic’ parts have finished.

However, a new regime has just been instituted in the rental house and the owner’s post-retirement age father has come to restore order. He mows the bindweed regularly, he mows the blackberries regularly, he mows everything that grows regularly and assures me that, other than grass, he has no interest in planting anything. That’s okay with me (although I had fond visions of our sharing the border between our property with a much larger raspberry patch that he would tend when I am not in residence), as long as the bindweed stops coming at me.

The bad side of all this, though, is that now I have to work on keeping the bindweed his predecessors allowed through into my western yard from going back to his eastern yard. And there is the other problem on the northern border. It would be so much easier if all good neighborliness took was a fence. Clearly, Frost didn’t have bindweed on his acreage.

Noxious Weeds/Nice Plants

The county government sent someone up to tell us about noxious weeds last month. They gave out a brochure with lots of pictures in it of plants that they wish you would not buy at the nursery and plant in your yard because they are ‘noxious.’ Well, that’s a highly judgmental word and, I expect, may be a matter of opinion.

I say this partly because two of the plants the speaker designated as noxious and undesirable are growing happily in my yard and I like them there. One is Japanese Knot Weed, which is something that looks like bamboo but is not and has lovely blossom sprays in the fall. I have a little patch of it outside my door (maybe 4’x4’, 10-12 canes) and it has stayed that size for the past 16 years, so it would appear that it is not impossible to keep it from spreading. In fact, it does spread: in the spring, maybe a dozen new plants appear around the outer circle. Treatment requires you to reach down with your fingers and break these sprouts off. They do not reappear, although the following spring you will have another dozen of these sprouts, and they will require the same low level of activity to keep them in check.

However, I am prepared to cut the bureaucrats some slack on this because, up on the Sunshine Coast, Japanese Knot Weed has propagated down the ditches and it is everywhere in great quantity. If not noxious, it is certainly prepared to give broom a run for its money. Broom is that yellow bush that blooms in April, usually, and is also an undesired and noxious plant. In fact, it is just as noxious as Knot Weed because both are Class B Noxious weeds, which means that the county can try to get rid of it but what it should really do is keep it from getting to areas where it doesn’t already thrive. The bottom line is, if you have Japanese Knot Weed, don’t plant it near running water and pinch off its new shoots in the spring. If you have broom, dig it out. It looks great, but it is a real spreader, as one can tell by the solid yellow roadsides in Point Roberts and elsewhere in Washington and B.C.. Of course, maybe you feel about your broom the way I feel about my Knotweed. That is the problem, of course.

The other noxious plant I have is Vinca, a ground cover with shiny dark green leaves and bright lavender flowers. A perfectly nice plant and other than they don’t like it, I can’t think of much wrong with it. It grows easily and it spreads, but you can cut it back. It doesn’t spread as much as Ajuga, say, and nobody thinks that’s a noxious anything. So they need to work harder to convince me that Vinca is a problem and shouldn’t be purchased as a yard plant. If they really don’t want us to buy it, if it’s really such a problem, maybe they ought to tell the plant nursery people to stop selling it?? In fact, Vinca isn’t even listed as a Class A, B, or C noxious weed, but it featured prominently in the brochure they handed out. So I guess it may fall into the category of ‘Some Other Things We Aren’t Too Crazy About.’

Washington has a nice site about all their noxious weeds (Classes A, B, and C), and I imagine your state has a similar list. Good jobs for botanists, I expect.