Weeds

I used to love helping my mother weed her vegetable garden when I was little. That’s when I first learned what “chickweed” was. Now it looks like it may just be spring in Cleveland. After several false starts, we may have finally just slipped from winter’s snowy mitts. Yes friends, that means it’s weed season. Time to sling the Turf Builder Plus 2 and nip the little buggers in the bud.

The variety of survival strategies devised by different weeds is amazing. Some will snap off just as you grab them, leaving the roots intact to grow another day. Others have prickly stems that discourage naked gardeners’ hands from touching them. There are weeds that look promisingly like something you want to keep in your flowerbed, so you give them a chance. This is your downfall as they grow taller and finally spit seeds everywhere before you realize you’ve been duped.

There is an especially annoying variety of weed in my backyard that seems to be a single plant, but when you pull it up, you find it’s connected to a string of plants with a cable of root that runs for several yards all through the garden.

And don’t get me started on dandelions. Has anyone ever actually gotten the entire root of a dandelion out of the ground in one piece? Now, be honest. I should be so rooted in my faith as those yellow devils are in my backyard.

There was a hedge of Rose of Sharon in our backyard for many years. I used to cut off the seed pods in the fall to try and keep them from propagating. I finally tore out all the bushes and I am still finding their progeny all over the place. They produce hundreds of junk plants that try to supplant the grass in the backyard. But do you know that if you had a Rose of Sharon seedling that you wanted to transplant, you have to baby it, watering it faithfully to keep it alive?

I can’t help but see parallels in people. There are those who snap off in your hand before you can get to know them very deeply. You probably know others who keep people at arm’s length by being so crabby they scare you off. Who wants to deal with downers like that?

Have you ever met someone who looked good at the outset, someone you’d like to get to know better, someone you thought came across well in the interview perhaps, or who seemed fascinating in the bar? Then they showed their true colors as they bungled things on the job or turned out to be selfish slobs you had to banish from your life with a restraining order.

You can learn a lot about people from what you find in your garden. Take a look sometime.