With more rain in the last two weeks than we had received in the prior three months, the weeds have decided to make a mad dash to maturity. Small and stunted garlic mustards shot up overnight. Dandelions that had been hugging the soil decide to flower and then seed in a matter of days. And don’t even get me started on the thousands of maple trees that are now growing on my lawn.
So this year, weeding has taken on more urgency as I hope to curtail next year’s crop by removing this year’s crop of flowers and seeds. For me it seems that the dominant weeds rotate over the years. In the beginning, the focus was on poison ivy where some vines were like adjunct limbs on my neighboring ashes and maples. But after cutting and pulling and spraying, I was able to rid most of the property of this undesirable ivy.
Next on the list was garlic mustard. On Long Island where I used to live, I never saw garlic mustard and when I encountered it here I thought it quite pretty, particularly in the first year where its large heart-shaped leaves provided a nice ground cover in my more barren areas. Not realizing it was a biennial, I did not know that its year-two form of a spike with small white flowers would multiply ad infinitum. So I have spent the last decade coming to an acceptable coexistence with this European native.
The same has been true of plantain, chickweed, dock, and other opportunistic refugees that have invaded my space. And the dandelion has maintained a balance not requiring me to care too much about its place in my gardens. Until now.
For the first 10 years of so, dandelions were the food stuffs of our rabbit collection so when food was collected, a bit of simple weeding and feeding worked hand in hand. After our rabbits died, the dandelion population held constant appearing to know that if they popped up, they would be dug up and fed to the bunnies.
This year, however, they have emerged from the lawn and gardens with unrestrained vigor and brazenness. They are in the blueberry and strawberry patches. They cover the lawn. They grow in cracks in the stone walls, They grow in the gravel parking space. In short, they are everywhere.
Now when you weed these bad boys, you have to focus on the flowers that have been pollinated and about to or have already gone to seed. Each flower can have nearly 200 seeds so you can see what you are up against. So over the course of a week, I am scurrying like a bee from one about-to-disperse-seeds dandelion to another. I sometimes think that they are conspiring against me practicing floral camouflage. As I sweep through a patch of flowers I could swear that some decide to seed and scatter the minute I am no longer facing them. Are they somehow communicating with each other?
It may not be so far-fetched as an article in the May 2012 issue of Scientific American suggests. Plants apparently send biochemical markers out when threatened. Could plants that are being pulled out by their roots be sending smelling screams to their peers? I don’t know but I’m just going to keep pulling.
