Crab grass season

It's crab grass season again, oh, joy!  Amazing how fast that stuff covers ground. You travel for two weeks and any bare space, and some not so bare spaces are covered.  Beds that got mulched a month ago are fine, but a few neglected places are chock full of weeds.  Poke weed if just getting going as is, a small white-flowered burr-bearing member of the Boraginaceae; used to have a long-haired cat that collected these like crazy.  TPP actually threw away a knit shirt that collected do many; removing them was quite unthinkable.  Funny, the name escape right now. Mrs. Phactor actually hates weeds and she's on a rampage. But severely hot weather and dry soil have slowed her down.  Do you think a weed of the week would be a good feature? 

Well watered June gardens

The first week of June has left our gardens well-watered with 3-4 inches of rain.  TPP had to remove water from the lily pond and will probably have to do so again today because of the 2.75 inches of rain in the last 24 hours. This is some 200-300% more rain than average. Fortunately the real heavy weather with high winds and hail passed just south of us. Can't remember when the low spots in our yard have been flooded so frequently. In late August and September it will probably be a drought. Too bad there's no way to store it all. Our rain barrel capacity is just 100 gallons. These weather fronts have our local conditions flip-flopping wildly, first aseasonally cool, cats-on-the-bed & blanket cool, now hot and steamy, a near 30F change in daily high temperature in one day. If you don't like the weather in the upper Midwest just wait a few minutes and it will change. Fortunately our neighborhood sits on a bit of a rise so no worries about damaging floods. People living on flood plains were watching out. All the rain has made weeds grow like crazy, and the only thing evening out the scales is that they are easy to pull when the ground is soft. The soft ground did assist with the removal of some wayward shrubs, spirea and a couple of old privets. TPP found a 6 foot tall pokeweed growing in a border garden; they easily get bigger, but not this early in the season. Welcome to summer.

Giving weeds no [lamb's] quarter

This has been a great year for certain weeds, weeds that are generally no so much of a problem. Thousands of sugar maple and red bud seedlings are quite usual because when you have huge sugar maple trees and many redbuds, well, that's just what you get.  In the lawns the seedlings just  get mowed, but so much of our yard are gardens woody weeds just have to be pulled or your garden starts becoming a forest, an unwanted succession.  A 3 foot tall redbud "sapling" was found in the raspberry bed, and the weed wrench (greatest tool not being sold any more as a political protest against government intrusion?) managed to pull it from the rain-softened ground 5 foot long root and all!  Hackberry seedlings are also a problem for the same reasons. This year lamb's quarter is everywhere in remarkable numbers as if someone had sprinkled it's seeds everywhere.  No idea how or why such a population boom occurred; it wasn't because we were neglectful last year. Wild lettuce and black nightshade is also pretty common this year too.  Some disturbances upwind may be the source of so many new weeds in such numbers. Pokeweed is pretty common in some areas, and in this case it's because some neighbors think poke a nice plant whose berries are good food for birds. Poke seedlings are clustered under bird perch locations, so they are quite right, and our yard provides lots of lodging while the neighbor's yard provides lots of food whose seed then gets transferred. A lot of work has gotten us to the point of almost being on top of the situation, although you realize you'll just have to do it again next year.

Nasty imported soil yields new weeds

Mrs. Phactor is death on weeds, and she knows the worst ones by name, reputation, and depth  of rooting.  An interesting thing happened as a result of refurbishing our lily pond.  A load of topsoil was imported to landscape the cascade, and it came with its own population of weed seeds.  Naturally a fine crop of weeds popped up on this massive disturbance, and as we slowly get this area tamed, the weeds have to go.  Oh, but Mrs. Phactor got quite a surprise because alien topsoil brought in some new species of weeds, ones not already in our estate, unfamiliar to her, and very, very unfortunately one of them happened to be Urtica dioica, stinging nettle.  Now she actually knows this plant, but was not expecting to see very juvenile seedlings, which are still quite capable of giving you a nasty surprise, and pulling them by hand, without gloves, well, you know what happened.  Do not bet on the nettles; Mrs. Phactor will extract her revenge upon them. 

Weedism vs. anthropocentric botany

This was awhile ago, but scholarship got in the way of blogging showing some misplaced priorities, but still this deserves a reply by way of understanding how things go.
Over at Casaubon’s Book, the Phactor added a comment stating that “Weeds were any plant growing where you didn’t want it, ” and Darwinsdog jumped my case:
“Who are "you" (or "me" or "we") to say where a plant should or shouldn't grow? I say inoculate the planet from orbit with the propagules of everything, and let flourish what will wherever it will. And let be out competed and go extinct whatever will. How about that? If it works for humans, why not for every & all other organisms? What's with such blatant anthropocentrism?” Oooo!

An old cartoon shows a dog at a computer saying to another dog, “The niftiest thing about the internet is that no one knows you’re a dog.” And maybe that explains why darwinsdog seems to dislike a human perspective so much. However, in one sense, and only one, is the charge of my being “blatantly anthropocentric” true. The current success of weedy species is completely a product of human activities. Just as a thought experiment let’s do as this cur suggests and let the chips fall where they may after inoculating the entire Earth with weeds of all sorts, with no regard for what humans want or need, and now, based on a knowledge of ecology imagine the outcome if humans were not involved.
Weeds in a biological sense are adapted to disturbed habitats, so there are two kinds of weeds, natural ones, and those that exist because of our activities, and without the agricultural/horticultural activities of humans disturbances largely disappear becoming smaller and less common. Nature produces disturbances too but as patches in a much larger landscape although some patches can be pretty big. Weeds grow fast and produce lots of offspring that are very good at dispersing, a necessary response to surviving in a patchy environment. A few weed offspring must find a new patch of disturbance because the patches themselves are short lived, replaced by a succession of organisms among which weeds are poor competitors. Initially weeds would have a field day, but their success would be short-lived as a success of better competing organisms began to push them back into the patches of disturbance that would naturally occur. In the long run, weeds would be put back in their rightful place. Weeds would be a minor element in the landscape as a whole, but only a very small population of gatherer-hunter humans would be able to make a living in that type of environment. So to take anything but an anthropocentric perspective simply ignores the current state of affairs, or you end up suggesting the human population should be reduced to pre-agricultural levels, which is a pretty drastic reduction. So our survival demands that we decide what plants will grow and where, up to a point. And this is my point, as it now stands, with vast tracks of land disturbed by human activities, we have provided vast opportunities for weeds, and we either let them take over, briefly, before nature relegates them to their proper place, or keep them in check in favor of our pet plants. If darwinsdog wants, he can have all the weeds recently removed from my asparagus for din-dins, while keeping my pet plant for myself. After all that’s the balance of nature, even if darwinsdog doesn’t seem to understand it.

On the weed war path

A late spring and a sudden transition to summer (drinking an iced coffee) has done nothing for my humor or my field work, but the weeds have done quite well, and so the Phactors have declared war upon weeds. Please notice that there was a formal declaration of war after we were invaded first and we only wage war to protect the homeland gardens. Here are the worst offenders: Indian strawberry, creeping charlie, oxalis, tillering grass, and the usual array of woody weeds: wild cherry, hackberry, sugar maple, redbud. In shady areas there can be 100-300 woody weed seedlings per square yard, and if you don't get them young, you end up with many less, but much harder weeds to remove (all hail the weed wrench!). The next step will be re-mulching lots of beds and paths. One good trick for gardens and paths is to put down either two layers (2 sheets) of newspaper or one layer of construction paper under the mulch. It decomposes but blocks weeds quite well for a season. This is particular important around shrubs and trees that do not like the fabric weed barriers, which are only useful under hard scape. Here's the real secret about weeding; get Mrs. Phactor going. She's a demon on weeds, sort of gets to a point where she just can't stand the sight of them any more, and shazam! Oops, caught taking a blog break!

Orchid children? What the ....?

Oh no, another plant analogy gone bad! Orchid children versus dandelion people? Dandelions hardy, orchids delicate and hard to handle! Yikes, how wrong can you be? Dandelions are only easy to grow because you keep disturbing the community by mowing your lawn. Stop it, let some succession take its course, and you’ll find dandelions difficult to grow because as weeds they require the constant disturbance your activities provide. While it’s true most to the habitats people are familiar with are the result of human disturbance, dandelions just won’t grow in most parts of most natural communities. Orchids however often grow in some very challenging environments, and they are hardly delicate. Most are tough as nails, and easy enough to grow if you can duplicate their habitat (and mostly you can’t, and that’s the problem). So the Phactor just hates it when these people who don’t know squat about plants use such labels. Hope this fellow knows more about people than plants. Such plant stereotypes just propagate botanical ignorance.

Do weeds grow faster?

Having just spent the 4th of July weekend trying to get caught up on my garden, a common gardening question that the Phactor has been asked many times comes to mind. Do weeds just seem to grow faster than other garden plants?

No, in general weeds really do grow faster than other garden plants. Here’s why.
Weeds are plants that are adapted to disturbed habitats. In nature disturbed habitats occur wherever something messes things up, and they can be small places like the disturbance of an uprooted fallen tree or big like after fire or storm damage. Such disturbed habitats are generally short-lived patches in unpredictable locations, so weeds are speed demons of growth and reproduction because they must reach reproductive maturity in a hurry and make lots of seeds so that some of their offspring have chance of dispersing to a newly disturbed place.

OK, here’s the bad news. Gardening and agriculture are disturbances. Human activities have provided weeds with opportunities for success on a massive scale. Doesn’t that just rub your rhubarb? The more you do the more disturbances you create. And since as a biological safety precaution against unforeseen weeding, weed seeds do not all germinate at once, and this weed seed bank in your soil is ready to replace all those weeds you worked so hard to remove.

Rather than be discouraged, the Phactor recommends you come to terms with weeds on a philosophical level. Such an attitude adjustment is greatly aided by sitting back and enjoying your garden with the help of a tall, cold mojito.