Homestead Gardener: Between the rows, between the cracks-A fantasia on weeds and weeding

With the garlic bulbs and the onions out of the ground and curing, and most everything else still weeks away from harvest, July in the garden is mostly a month of maintenance and of making the rounds.  That means the chief activity is weeding and the primary stances are bending and squatting.  We wonder and wander as we weed, of course, tending to many other things along the way.  I am not sure if “multitasking” is the right word for this activity; it seems to me more a combination of daydreaming and that form of non-reportable work known as “poking about.”  

July, in other words, is a dangerous time for gardeners who are already by temperament prone to flights of fancy and who tend to lose track of time.  This is pretty much every gardener.  Nothing gets the mind to wandering and sets the fancy to flight like the ritual of weeding the garden, typically done early in the morning when the air is coolest and the sun is lowest and the pressures and full reality of the day have yet to settle in.  Yes, we are the butterfly-chasers, the distractable lost souls, those who love to lose themselves in the labyrinth of an enclosed space.  While weeding the garden, I have on more than one occasion misplaced my half-finished cup of morning coffee (which reminds me of all the umbrellas I have left hanging on the third or fourth shelves in the back aisles of libraries).  

When we devote so much of our time to a selfless task like weeding, moreover, we are likely to be absorbed in other ways — to develop a special relationship with and even cultivate a philosophical attitude toward weeds.  What IS a weed, anyway?  Do we go to war with them, learn to live with them, embrace them for counter-intuitive reasons?  We have to take a stand before we bend over to deal with them.

In spite of their reputation for being unwanted, weeds have inspired quite a lot of poetic attention.  Most people have heard some version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous comment: “A weed is but a plant whose virtues remain undiscovered.”  How many times has that line been quoted in garden writing over the decades?  I have just succumbed to the tradition myself, and I am just about to follow through on my duties as cliché-bearer and riff upon this theme for the length of a column…

My favorite quote on weeds, actually, is an extended flight of fancy that makes no explicit mention of any weed at all.  It was written by the 17th-century English devotional writer Thomas Traherne (and I retain here the quaint spelling and language of the original):

  “And what Rule do you think I walked by? Truly a Strange one, but the best in the Whole World.  I was Guided by an Implicit Faith in God’s Goodness: and therfore led to the Study of the most Obvious and Common Things.  For thus I thought within my self: God being, as we generaly believ, infinit in Goodness, it is most consonant and Agreeable with His Nature, that the Best Things should be most Common, for nothing is more Naturall to infinit Goodness, then to make the Best Things most frequent and only Things Worthless, Scarce.  Then I began to Enquire what Things were most Common: Air, Light, Heaven and Earth, Water, the Sun, Trees, Men and Women …”

 And so on.  When I read through Traherne’s list of common and therefore valuable and sacred things, I cannot help but think of goldenrods and dandelions, milkweed and chickweed – things that I already value as a gardener and meet with almost every day of the summer.  This is the company I keep, these the rules I have learned to live by.  

So in the spirit of Traherne and Emerson and all those defenders of the common and lovers of fairy tales and fanciful logic, let us go take a walk in our gardens and catalog some of what has serendipitously come up between the rows since we last looked!

A selected tour of the weed garden

Lamb’s quarter (Chenopodium album):  Weeds are the scandal of the garden, because a good number of them are far more nutritious – and often tastier – than the plants we seed and cultivate and coddle in their parallel rows (designed, ironically, to facilitate weeding).  Lamb’s quarters come immediately to my mind. Lamb’s quarters are off the charts in terms of nutrient value, and I know I am not alone in preferring lamb’s quarter leaves to just about every variety of cultivated spinach.  Lamb’s quarters will not bolt like spinach, which is yet another advantage.  Many weeds take well to compacted soil of poor quality; lamb’s quarter is not one of them.  Their natural habitat is loamy, friable, nutrient-rich garden beds where your annual veggies are grown.  In fact, the presence of lamb’s quarters is a sign of good soil.

And they will keep returning throughout the summer, without coddling or encouragement. An average-sized lamb’s quarter plant produces more than 70,000 seeds – yes, that’s right – and they are therefore best pulled and eaten before they get to that late stage. 

Dandelion:  Ah, the ubiquitous and lovely dandelion!  Put that Round-Up away and have another look.  Dandelion leaves are the poor man’s salad greens, and everyone’s favorite green in the earliest weeks of Spring when the leaves are smallish and not yet bitter and all we have in our rows are unthinned microgreens.  Dandelion seeds are carried by the wind, as you may have noticed, with an average of 15,000 seeds per plant per year.  Since arriving to the North American continent, dandelions have co-evolved recently with children under the age of ten who like to assist in their propagation with the swinging of a stick or the making of a wish.

 Purslane (Portulaca oleracea):  I am drafting this column in the middle of June, and just this morning I spotted the first purslane coming up in my vegetable garden – one sign that the summer temperatures are warming up.  Purslane is a heat-loving, succulent annual weed that is full of nutrients.  It has a wonderfully crisp texture and a mild but distinctive flavor (something like watercress).  I add purslane to salads as a mixed green, but most often I simply nibble on it as I make my regular rounds through the garden.  It is a matting weed; and if it is not brushing shoulders with another competitor, I often choose to leave it as a “living mulch.”  Purslane also doubles as a great fertilizer/mulch when it is pulled and left to compost in place.  For me, purslane is one of the most attractive summer weeds from an aesthetic point of view; it has something of the shapely beauty of a jade plant.   With its pleasing contours and subtle shadings of color, purslane would make a fine subject for a drawing in pastels or colored pencil.  

Plantain (Plantago major):   A botanist who visited New England in 1798 found broadleaf plantain so widespread that he classified it as a native.  But like dandelion and many other common weeds, plantain comes from elsewhere (plantain originating in Eurasia).  I have always loved the sight of the scalloped leaves of the plantain, both the broad-leafed and the narrower-leafed buckhorn variety.  

Plantain can look out for itself.  It thrives in compacted and nutrient-poor soils, though it will take root just about anywhere.  A single plantain plant can produce up to 14,000 seeds per year, and each seed can remain viable in the soil for up to 60 years (waiting patiently for someone to till and bring it closer to the surface where it can germinate).  There is always an onsite market for a pulled-up plantain. We make an effective anti-itch salve with plantain. Our rabbits and goats love the nutrient-rich plantain leaves; along with dandelions, they are actually a welcome staple in our goat pasture.  It is also worth mentioning that plantain seeds have a high oil content and are a valuable food source for birds.  

These are but a few of the weeds I meet on a daily basis in the middle weeks of summer.  There are many others that I could profile:  Nutsedge, chickweed, smartweed, Canada thistle, amaranth, wood sorrel (a.k.a. “lemon clover”), not to mention the “Creeping Charlie” that thrives around edges or the various grasses that like to find a spot in my beds. Perhaps these bed-mates of mine will get their own fifteen minutes of fame in a future column.  

Bindweed:  Finally, I must say a few non-devotional words about a common weed whose virtue, if it has one, remains obscure to me; a weed that I have a hard time living with and, deep down, I long to exorcise and eradicate completely.   I am talking about the notorious bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis … it even sounds sinister in Latin, doesn’t it?).  

Bindweed is related to the Morning Glory, which has some recognizable virtues.  Like its ornamental cousin, bindweed is a vigorous vining weed.  That is perhaps putting it mildly.  The truly terrifying aspect of bindweed is what it does rhizomatically, deep below the surface, where the roots form extensive networks and compete with – essentially strangle – the root systems of other plants.  Pulling bindweed up by the root is most often a futile exercise, since any part that breaks off will simply regrow with a vengeance.  It is almost as if bindweed knows that most garden weeders become overwhelmed with the task and do not have quite the full discipline to stay the course.  But if you do stay the course, cutting off bindweed top growth every day, as soon as it emerges from the dark depths of Hades into the light of day, then the squiggly umbilical cord of the root will expend all its energy without aid of the sun and eventually die out underground never to return again.  I admit I am still trying to arrive at a broad-minded philosophical stance toward bindweed; in the meantime, this peace-loving gardener feels (alas) that he is engaged in a long-term war.  I await enlightenment…

Summer weeding, summer reading

So much for the poetic and fanciful point of view.  Let’s now entertain a modern, scientific, ecological point of view and ask another question in the language that is currently popular: Should we classify weeds as opportunistic, non-native, “invasive species”?   It is true that most of the familiar weeds you and I pull and mulch and munch on are not native to this continent, even though they have been here a while.  And they will likely take over the garden if we do not make our morning rounds.  

In the heat of the summer’s afternoons, I have been making my way through Tao Orion’s provocative and important new book, Beyond the War on Invasive Species.  Orion asks us to rethink invasive species as filling a new and often valuable niche in disturbed ecosystems.  She makes the intriguing (albeit contentious) argument that the demonization of invasive species oversimplifies a complex reality by diverting attention away from the ecosystem disturbances that created those niches in the first place. We are the disturbers.  Nature is OK with disturbance but she abhors an empty space.  While reading Orion’s book, it occurred to me that every space cleared for a garden is such a disturbance, and whenever we clean the slate we are inviting weeds to come in and restore cover.  The “invaders” are just doing their niche-filling job.  Ecology is not a melodrama, a battle between invaders and nativist protectors, and that (I think) is Orion’s basic point.

Although there are surely exceptions and qualifications – and there is always bindweed to keep our ambitions in check, theoretical or otherwise – Orion’s way of looking at things nevertheless makes deep sense to me.  Many weeds may be thought of as opportunistic in the best “healing” sense.  The ones with deep taproots draw up minerals from the subsoil and deposit them above.  That is filling a niche, and at the same time healing a wound.  There is always a sense of poetic irony in the uncanny sight of a dandelion or plantain heroically growing up through the crack of a driveway or a sidewalk, when the only surface above to fertilize and build upon is hard pavement.  Maybe the weeds have a longer-term plan; there are cracks, after all.

My fanciful logic, then – taking its cue from Thomas Traherne and more recently from Tao Orion’s book – is that weeds are not so much invasive as reparative and remedial.  Whenever I pull a plantain or a dandelion and place it as mulch on the surface, I now silently give thanks.  The weeds bring up nutrients to the topsoil from areas that are compacted and nutrient-deficient, and the ones with taproots help to aerate and loosen the compaction of the soil.  I like to think I am working with them to expedite the slow process of re-building topsoil.  I am not the builder, though; I am just a gardener making the rounds.  All of my discoveries are serendipitous, most of my decisions are made at least partly on a whim, and I am just passing through.

An ecology of things

Aha! There is that coffee cup I misplaced last week.  It is sitting on top of a post (three or four shelves high) where I ought to have noticed it but somehow did not.  The cup has since filled with rainwater.  I pause a moment, and do not have to wait long before I see that the handle has become a convenient perch for a brightly colored goldfinch who has stopped for a drink. Fancy that!  Has my cup adapted and found its niche?  I am inspired to come up with a new by-law or corollary of ecology: “One creature’s loss is another creature’s find,” or perhaps “every found object must at one time be lost.”  Can we imagine a more inclusive ecology of things?  “Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks, and stones, and trees.” There’s a notion to ponder during a summer morning interlude.   And all it takes is the call of a bird or the sight of a butterfly for the earthbound, bent-over gardener to look up and lose track of what she is doing and let such thoughts take flight.