I have a gardening style that I like to refer to as “desultory” because it sounds fancier than “hit or miss.” My garden is a fairly good size for the city. None of it is in lawn. “Good for you,” people call out. “Those lawns are such a lot of work.”
No, they’re not. You shave them with a power mower now and then and call it a day. Meanwhile, every patch of my soil has something going on in it and a lot of it is not authorized.
But I lose focus. I’ll start out on a likely patch with the best intentions and then haul weeds to the yard debris bin, and on the way back I see another likely patch that maybe I should tackle first, and then I go in for water and walk by a whole ‘nother patch that really needs to get under control, and by the end of the day, I’ve done all this stuff in all these places and nobody can tell.
But this weekend I’m getting a load of compost mulch delivered. They’ll dump a big ole pile in the street. So now I’m trying my hardest to get ahead of the game by getting actual significant portions weed-free in anticipation of my big pile. Once the mulch goes on a well-weeded patch, things will settle down for a good while. It’s a little method I think of as “clear and hold.”
I think this is a technique associated with whatever the hell we’ve been doing in Afghanistan. A piece of territory gets cleared of Taliban and then a few guys get assigned to Holding It–let’s call them military mulch–and then you go clear another bit. It works great, and we know, because we’ve been doing it for eighteen years.
But I won’t get it all cleared, not by a long shot. So the second technique comes into play. This involves muscle memory. My entire body has learned which portions of the yard should not be looked at, and I am quite capable of wandering through it in a haze of admiration that edits out all the bad parts. I don’t even notice them until a guest comes and pauses in front of an unruly spot. Oh that. I was getting to that, I lie.
Every weed in my garden is fully aware that there is no Shock And Awe coming. There will be no drone strikes of glyphosate; and at some point in August, all the troops are going to leave and allow everything to run rampant, and the only chemical agent being applied will be gin to the gardener. If there’s still a heap of compost at the curb, I’ll sculpt it into a Volkswagen Beetle and stick a petunia in it.
I’m not one to trivialize the dreadful conditions pertaining in the world by making false comparisons, and I will not stoop to referring to any of my doughty garden invasives as The Taliban.
I would never say that. But just between you and me, the field bindweed doesn’t believe girls should be educated.
You are SO right! I have a rather large yard — none of it grass. I, too, have invasives to deal with, only here it is honeysuckle, english ivy, poison ivy, and numerous baby trees that must be culled (planted by squirrels and birds.) We have a lot of trees, and vines want to take them over. So a couple times a year, I have to wrestle them down from the tree trunks. I generally think of areas of my yard in terms of sections that can be done in a couple hours. I just do one section at a time as thoroughly as I can, even if I spot something in another section that must be culled. I'll get to it when it's that section's turn. Since we actually has a spring this year, instead of going immediately to summer, I was able to make the weeding circuit of my entire yard this time. (Usually, the mosquitoes drive me back into the house until fall.)
I also think of my yard as sections that can be done in two hours, but then I don't do them.
I'd say that 'desultory' leads to biodiversity, which is a good thing. And your only drone deployments will be strictly for the purposes of bee love.
In this case desultory does indeed lead to biodiversity, and I don't think that has ever been said before.
You have described my garden. And mindset. I am still (when am I not) in weeding mode though. There aren't enough clear(ish) spots for the mulch. Yet.
Me too. I just finished putting out all the mulch. It looks so wonderful I'm considering not planting anything in it.
I discovered this past summer that I can no longer do all my beds in one Saturday. When did I get so old and stooped over that I cannot walk for days afterwards? I go along and dig out blackberries and in the fall I am good at raking maple leaves onto all the beds and leftover grass I want to die over the winter.
This is why you had children and grandchildren.
Phooey! says I. Educate the girls and see your world change for the better. Of course it means the men will no longer be "THE BOSS" but that's a good thing.
I say also, draw a grid of your yard and work your way through square by square so no bits get missed then mulch everything.
Are you KIDDING ME? I'd be mulching in December! Believe me, some of it just going to get missed.
I don't have a garden, but I would be useless at tending one if I did. I actually like many plants that people call 'weeds' and I feel very guilty when I deprive the bees of the flowers on them when I cut them down, which I sometimes do at my rural workshop. A good gardener has to be as ruthless as the Taliban.
Using the same sensibilities, I don't do anything to my garden after about August. Whatever flowers are drying up, their seedheads stay put. Fallen leaves stay put. Nothing moves until spring mulch time.
I had a very large yard in Maine which took about 20 hours a week to care for – including vegetables and fruit trees. It was a beautiful nature preserve but I rarely got to sit in it and relax. Gardening was good medicine, though, even though the yard always looked neglected.
One thing I always notice about Maine is how everyone has a huge lawn and you could ride a mower through the whole state without climbing off.
We had something similar, endless connected lawns, in the suburbs in central CT, where I grew up. Or tried to, with limited success. When we (my wife is from Detroit) first bought a house in CA, we were shocked to learn that here, the first thing people do when building on a bare lot is to throw up a fence, usually opaque, usually 6' tall, and usually redwood. At first we thought we had a view of the distant water, but the neighbors quickly cured us of that (optical) illusion. We negotiated the height of the new fence down to 4', but a set of soon-to-be-huge fir trees eventually made that pointless. We got used to the privacy, but then the neighbors moved away and the new neighbors built a two-story backyard playhouse from which their kids could look directly into our windows. We re-negotiated the replacement for the thirty-year-old falling-down fence at a new height, 5'. Welcome to CA.
Aw, leave the weeds alone. They're people, too.
Think of it as editing.
I like the idea of muscle memory. Though I'm fast approaching a time when muscles will win and tell memory to sod off! For the record, we do not have "lawn". We have scruffy, weedy grass which is mowed when it's green ie, in the rainy season.
Nobody needs to mow here after about mid-June, but they make their own rain, and then they keep mowing.
I’ve never experienced such a thing until now, having moved into my new old home in March, the place inhabited by a master gardener for god knows how many years, followed by a couple with a young child, thus engaging a commercial gardener to do ALL the heavy lifting! He even left their number and praise. Well, that is not how I roll but gosh damn it’s killing my musical fingers and stabs me in the back as I marvel at its fecund beauty and colors while I try to manage the space. Mulch?
Mulch.
I will think these thoughts as I am wandering around the garden deciding which flower bed to attack.
Sometimes that just turns into wandering and no attacking.
I have been thinking about exploring the legality of napalm… we have this new invasive weed – Hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta) -It started showing up a few years ago (I blame climate change) and now it runs rampant everywhere. it has taken over my poor excuse for a lawn and most of my garden. It pops up everywhere there is a speck of soil and has these cute tiny little white flowers which are followed soon there after by tons of little seed pods – and when they get a little ripe – and you touch them – they explode into a shower spray of seeds – hundreds of tiny seeds. Even though I wear glasses I have had these explosions go into my eye several times… I have thought many times I will declare war and clean them out – (after all they have tried to blind me! – no mercy!) but it never works.
This spring I pulled about a cubic yard of this crap and put it in my compost. The saving grace is that (unlike many weeds that have extensive root structures and laugh at efforts to uproot them) the new invader is easy to pull and has a meager root system. The power of this particular foe is not in a root system that never gives up, but rather in the sheer numbers of seeds and the ability to spew them far and wide, temporarily blinding wood-be weeders. I am thinking a flame thrower or a napalm strike might be just the ticket, though I suspect there will be Taliban weeds hiding in tunnels, waiting for the airstikes to pass so they can move back in and blow up a girls school or maybe a wedding.
Oh! I looked it up. We've got gobs of that. I try to get it before it seeds but you have to get up pretty early in the…um…year to do that. It doesn't bother me as much as the ones that root deep and wide though.
I use the same approach to housekeeping… a little bit here, a little bit there, and nobody can tell I did anything. Maybe I need a load of mulch.
You know how people thought they'd get around to deep housecleaning during the lockdowns? Uh. Turns out having the time wasn't the issue.