As I drove away from the house last Thursday to spend a few days at the other end of the state, I could hear the weeds in my garden applauding. "She's gone!" they cried out. "Time to party!" They ordered out for some heavy rain and spent the next three days drinking deeply and indulging in unbridled growth and reproduction.
This morning I took hoe in hand and walked down to the garden to announce that the party's over. Except it isn't, quite.
The rain stopped around noon yesterday but this morning the ground was still too wet and heavy to make hoeing possible, and walking on wet ground compresses the soil, making tender young vegetable plants unhappy. So I mostly stooped over pulling weeds around the edges of the garden that I could reach from the grass.
Weeds pull up easily from wet soil, but they also bring a lot of that soil up with them, so I had to shake off the soil before tossing the weeds away or else they would just sprout right back up again. Where does all that heavy wet soil go when I shake it off? Why, a little bit of everywhere. Within minutes I looked like the Muskingum Mud Beast.
I barely made a dent in the weeds this morning, but if the sun keeps shining today, the garden should be dry enough for some serious weeding tomorrow. The weeds have been reprieved for now, but tomorrow--look out, weeds. The party's over.
2 comments:
Wow! I'm actually starting to feel sorry for them. It's like I'm watching one of those scenes in a movie, where as an audience member, I know that they're about to fall victim to surprise assault and they are completely oblivious.
See, when I say "garden" I mean the whole half acre, and thus I have learned to accommodate. Some will die, that others may give the invited guests a chance to live.
D.
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