dressed to weed

garden-cat

Sunny and warm: a per­fect morn­ing for cats and gar­den­ers. The cat had her chores, mainly to stare at inter­est­ing things in the gar­den, and I had mine.

arctotis-before-deadheading

Task #1 was to dead­head the arc­to­tis (African daisy) that has been bloom­ing for sev­eral months. This is the “before” on one plant…

arctotis-after-deadheading

…and the “after” on another. Arc­to­tis goes on bloom­ing regard­less of whether it’s been dead­headed or not. But the plants looked like they were wind­ing down for the year, and I was hop­ing to extend their sea­son a bit.

The plants are attrac­tive, but I thought the bucket of trim­mings was pretty cool, too.

arctotis-bucket

arctotis-bucket-2

Chore #2 was to weed one of the patches of bromeli­ads that we’d let loose in the back of a raised bed. bromeliad-spines The plant has rigid spines like teeth on a sharp saw blade, which makes weed­ing tricky, and forces you to ask your­self, “Do I really want to do this?”

John started on the task and ended up with bloody fore­arms. Not happy. He went for the pitch­fork, think­ing we could lift the clumps, weed under them, and then set the clumps back. These are plants with almost no roots, and that would have worked fine.

But I pro­posed another idea. I have these long cor­dura motor­cy­cle gauntlets that I use when I ride my scooter when it’s cold out. They pro­tect your hands, but also your fore­arms. Would those work for the gar­den, too?

dressed-to-weed

I suited up, first a thick long-sleeved sweat­shirt, and then the gauntlets. Okay, it’s not par­tic­u­larly haute cou­ture, and it’s not a look I’d want to inflict on the world. But it worked.

bromeliad-bloom-closeupWhy all this effort? Well, the flow­ers are pretty stun­ning right now in an unre­strained, trop­i­cal way. And the plants are sur­pris­ingly drought-tolerant.

Weed­ing around them seems to be the main chal­lenge. But now we’ve got an easy solution…

(Addi­tion, May 9, 2012: Thanks to Kathryn who com­mented with a prob­a­bly ID. Track­ing down her lead led be to the Florida Coun­cil of Bromeliad Soci­eties’ Bromeliad Species Data­base, where the best fit seems to be Aech­mea dis­tichan­tha v. glaziovii. You have no idea how much it both­ers me to have a plant that I don’t know the name of, so it’s one more down, a few dozen in the gar­den to go…)

April 17 2009 11:12 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • •

11 Responses to “dressed to weed”

  1. Gayle Madwin on 18 Apr 2009 at 12:09 am #

    Yikes! And I thought my weed­ing chores were bad.

    I dug out a bunch of nutsedge last week, leav­ing large holes, which pro­duce poor drainage, which will pro­duce more nutsedge if I don’t fill in the holes. I did fill in a few already, but I have a lot more left to go. It’s a good thing we’re enter­ing the dry season!

  2. Karen - An Artist's Garden on 18 Apr 2009 at 3:27 pm #

    Eeek — rather you than me.
    :)
    K

  3. lostlandscape on 18 Apr 2009 at 3:48 pm #

    Gayle, I dropped a note at your blog about my own sedge prob­lems. Given my choice between a few spines and unstop­pable sedge, I’d pick the spines any day. Good luck with your eradication!

    Karen, not a look to emu­late, eh?

  4. Jenny on 18 Apr 2009 at 4:15 pm #

    I asked a spe­cialty grower how he weeded around them and he said long han­dled tongs like you use in the kitchen.

  5. lostlandscape on 19 Apr 2009 at 9:52 am #

    I didn’t have my cam­era with me on one of my last nurs­ery trips. Next to the lit­tle 2-inch pots of cac­tuses was a pair of bar­be­cue tongs to help you get the spiny crit­ters into your shop­ping cart. Pretty funny.

  6. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » friday garden roundup on 17 Jul 2009 at 10:14 am #

    […] melianthus grows next to a bromeliad that truly is nasty and spiny. (I’ve men­tioned this plant before…) Pretty though, even when it’s not flow­er­ing. And it takes next to no water when grown in […]

  7. Kathryn on 08 May 2012 at 3:12 pm #

    Hi, in your post about dressed to weed you talk about a bromeliad that is nasty and spiny but you don’t men­tion the name of it. I was won­der­ing if you would or could tell me the name of that plant.Thank you so much for your time.

  8. James on 08 May 2012 at 8:24 pm #

    Hi Kathryn,
    This was a hand-me-down plant with no label. There are sev­eral species in the spiny plant­ing, includ­ing an Aech­mea fas­ci­ata, which is pretty painful to work with, but not nearly as spiny as the evil plant in ques­tion. It’s very likely another Aech­mea, and looks like the hybrids Blue Tango or Del Mar, but it could be some­thing that looks a lot like them. I can try to ID it when it flow­ers, prob­a­bly later this spring.

  9. Kathryn on 09 May 2012 at 1:44 pm #

    Hi James and thank you very much for your reply! I think I’ve found the bromeliad in ques­tion. It’s the B-Aechmea-distic-sclumberg-L listed here (I think) Taske a look here… http://www.bromsandpalms.com/bromeliads/

  10. James on 09 May 2012 at 8:57 pm #

    Hi Kathryn, thanks for the help with the ID. Yes that’s the plant! The link included an abbre­vi­a­tion that sent me fur­ther to try to find out exactly what it was. Thanks to the Florida Coun­cil of Bromeliad Soci­eties web­site I’ve come up with a a com­plete name for it: Aech­mea dis­tichan­tha v. glaziovii (http://fcbs.org/cgi-bin/dbman/db.cgi?db=photo&uid=default&photono=56&ww=on&mh=5&view_records=View+Records)

  11. Kathryn on 10 May 2012 at 9:57 am #

    Thanks James! You are bril­liant! You took it a step or three fur­ther than I did!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply