These days I’m methodically whacking my way through a large weeding project: an extended community garden that I neglected for an even more-annoying project for too many months this spring/summer. Tackling the mess in the morning to avoid the worst heat of these days with heat warnings, I fill a large composting bag a day and yet am uncertain whether I’m removing weeds and cutting back invasive plants faster than they’re growing.
Today, though, I woke up to rain, sorely needed but not entirely welcome in this dreary incarnation, even so.
Cold, grey rain pounds down
Wrecking planned fun, but off’ring
Day pass from weeding.
As someone here tends to say, nothing is all good or all bad.
I have noticed that Ottawa receives the storms that give us the cold shoulder, barely, while rushing eastward. You can count on regular day passes as the August drought pants to death. You may be the only poet ever to pen a haiku about not weeding. I wonder if my patient impatiens will be impressed if I read them verse instead of tackling the crab grass? It is a tempting thought!
Laurna – Weather is determinedly local. Friends at White Lake (about 75 minutes drive up the Ottawa Valley) reported high winds the other day while it was “flat calm” here. As for poetic subjects, I’d think every genre would have odes to not-weeding. Maybe we could work on a selection. Do you want to tackle the sonnet? I have a few folks in my mind for the free-verse version and maybe one for the limerick.
Our view of weeds keeps
us from seeing them as plots
of unloved flowers!
Tom
Tom – 🙂 My mother used to say of cormorants, “Only a mother could love that face.” While that seemed unfair to me, I do hold that not even its mother could love any part of a full-fledged burdock. As for the dog-strangling vine, they’re not ugly but don’t turn your back on one.
I let some “weeds” grow in a pot with creeping jenny and something else from the plant store. Weeds kills both. So I plucked out the tall weeds. The creeping jenny came back to life, but with tiny-tiny bright green leaves. I get now my weeds need pulling.
Barbara – Volunteer plants aren’t always noxious weeds, but many of them are. The energy that makes effective volunteers is often linked to undesirable characteristics like prickles or burrs or a tendency to grow sideways so fast everything else is choked out. I’ve developed a new relationship with my shears and now try first to clip all the unwanted bits right back to ground level. It doesn’t kill them but neither does it spread seeds/shoots – and it does seem to discourage them for a while.