Jaci Dawn

                It is May. The month of flowers and weeding. Lots and lots of weeding. I do little else in May: the house can get dirty, the houseplants wilt, and artwork go by the wayside. Genealogy is an obsession that can wait until the last weed is pulled and flower bed edged. Everything in my world is about dirt: the texture, the smell, the tiny creatures that live within it, and the clumps of it that cling to the roots of the weeds I just pulled. Dirt under my fingernails, behind my ears, and pressed into the fabric of my jeans. Dirt cleanses my mind.

                Because we have had a wetter (than usual) April, May has brought forth more weeds. I feel like I am fighting a losing battle.

                Weeds are subjective. There are some plants you do not want in your garden because f how invasive and plant-soul-sucking (meaning they crowd out plants you want to grow) they are. Herb Robert (“Stinky Bob”, St. Robert’s Herb, Geranium Robertianum) is one of the most invasive in this area. Pretty pink flowers, edibility, and herbal uses aside: Stinky Bob is a weed to eradicate. Chickweed in all of its forms. CLOVER. Grass – Lord, GRASS. I despise grass. Crab grass, saw grass, clumping grass – I don’t know the names of the invasive grasses in my flower beds, but I know how much I despise grass. I’m allergic to all grass.

                But – I love foxglove, forget-me-nots, Japanese anemones, daisies, “baby-blue-eyes”, and speedwells – all considered “weeds” by others. We allow dandelions and false dandelions to grow, flower, and seed in our lawn (sorry, neighbors with the chemical lawns). Native milkweeds make their way under the concrete and into the garage on deep runner roots. I have daylilies in the public right-of-way (should the city ever develop the area, I won’t be out much in terms of flowers, but they are pretty when they bloom).

                Sword ferns are a weed in the Pacific Northwest. I have spaces for ferns.

I have crocosmia that needs reined in and Shasta daisies ushing the limits of their location. Asters, “pearly everlasting”, and carnations that just seem to grow despite everything. The peonies – and I have a lot of peonies – need mulched and fertilized.

My flower beds are a mix of natives and perennials I like. I don’t do much with annuals, except to plant marigolds around my roses every year to fight off aphids and the petunias I plant in hanging planters. My fuschias are “hardy” ones that dies back in the winter and come back up in the spring. I once thought that going “all perennials” would make each growing season easier except there’s the profusion of weeds that are so difficult to eradicate naturally.

Tomorrow (or Sunday) I will apply a mix of vinegar+salt+Dawn dishwashing soap to some of the hard-to-weed areas. I’m using professional grade vinegar (Home Depot): one gallon+1 cup cheap salt + TBS of Dawn. I’ll spray it on the ivy, the grasses, the “stinky Bob”. I can’t use it near my flowers. It won’t kill the roots – at first. Multiple applications will eventually kill the roots. It doesn’t have a half life like commercial herbicides. (But I will confess to having used Round Up on Himalayan blackberries, the scourge of the PNW – but I now have those mostly under control and just stripping them of leaves kills them: can’t grow chlorophyll which feeds the stems.)

English ivy is harder to kill: the roots are under my neighbor’s fences but the plants grow on my side of the fences. The neighbors poison everything, but as long as ivy can find a place to get chlorophyll, it thrives. My side of the yard. I am hoping my vinegar solution will work on the ivy. I have a week of nice weather for it to soak into those leaves and kill them.

This is my life every March-June. Everything else falls to the side until I get the flower beds whipped into some sort of order.  Then the weather gets warm and I avoid the loft where my computer is. And, finally, the season of dead-heading comes upon us, but only those plants that the birds will not use for foraging throughout the winter. I’ll mulch and make a final pass at weeding in the hopes that I will beat the grasses back before Spring comes around again.

I always lose.