[ Lost in the Landscape ]

almost useless weeding advice

I’m sure you’ve read those earnest but wacked let­ters sent to advice columns, let­ters where the writer wants to share a piece of house­keep­ing inge­nu­ity that you look at and find your­self gob­s­macked by the total use­less­ness of the advice being offered. These let­ters might begin some­thing like, “Dear Heloise, you know, I never throw out corn tas­sels any­more because I real­ized that I could use them to make wigs for my pet iguana…” (I might be mak­ing this one up. Maybe not. It doesn’t really matter.)

Both John and I had read in one of the papers a while back that you could use boil­ing water to con­trol weeds. Inspired one day after mak­ing a pot of pasta, remem­ber­ing what he’d read, John drained the pasta water out onto some weeds that were grow­ing in the cracks out on the patio. Not long after­wards the weeds croaked. Some­how it all seemed to make sense.

So…at the risk of sound­ing too much like like Heloise…I pass on this piece of gar­den­ing advice.

You’ll have to think this method through a lit­tle before apply­ing it to many sit­u­a­tions in the gar­den. This works if you want to kill every­thing, like in the mid­dle of hard­scape, but prob­a­bly isn’t a good idea if there might be roots of a desir­able plant nearby. Also, it really does take a lot of boil­ing water to pol­ish off some stub­born plants. It’s not a par­tic­u­larly effec­tive or method. If you salt your pasta water to the point of sea­wa­ter you might not want to intro­duce all the salts near frag­ile plants. And the hot water might even stim­u­late some dor­mant seeds into growth, since the method is almost exactly the “hot water method” that’s referred to in man­u­als on seed propagation.

Still, if you find your­self with a big pot of boil­ing water that you’d oth­er­wise dump down the drain and have a patio full of weeds nearby, this might be just the thing to do.

While out weed­ing I’ve been notic­ing that some of the plants grow­ing up in the cracks aren’t the stan­dard nasty beast­ies that have been plagu­ing me over the years. These are in fact some Cal­i­for­nia natives, seedlings of par­ents I’ve planted in the gar­den in places where I wanted them. The seedlings are try­ing to start up a new gen­er­a­tion in places where I really don’t want them, but I’m hav­ing a hard time pulling them out.

This one’s Clarkia rubi­cunda ssp. blas­dalei. I think I’ll let it flower before remov­ing the plant. It’s an annual, besides, so I should be able to indulge it for a month longer, to let it ful­fill its bio­log­i­cal destiny.

San Miguel Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens, one of sev­eral I’ve noticed recently. I like the plant, but I’m afraid its choice of loca­tion sucks. I think I’ll be able to pull it out soon.

Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush, Artemisia cal­i­for­nica. I really hate to pull up any­thing with a species name of “cal­i­for­nica,” but once again its choice of loca­tion totally sucks. So far–for over a year now–it’s avoided get­ting doused with pasta water or get­ting yanked out of the ground. But a plant in the wrong place is a plant in the wrong place.

I have to admit it. This plant, in this spot, is a weed.

April 11 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: native plants • weeding • weeds | 16 Comments »

no storms this weekend

Finally. A week­end with good weather and no major out­side com­mit­ments. The local paper recently noted that of eight week­ends, six had been wet and stormy. Out­door leisure busi­nesses were hurt­ing, the paper noted. I’d guess plantsellers would be in the same sit­u­a­tion, though I really think gar­den­ing is much too impor­tant a thing to even begin to call “leisure.”

One of the com­mit­ments that ate into the free time was a fam­ily birth­day that we cel­e­brated at a rental condo down on Mis­sion Beach (San Diego Beach House). That was the day of the mega-earthquake in Chile and the inter­na­tional tsunami alerts. A pretty bizarre day for a party.

Life­guards a few miles up the coast noted some abnor­mal tidal action that they thought had some­thing to do with the tsunami, but we were enough in cel­e­bra­tion mode that we didn’t notice it.

Some­where dur­ing the after­noon some­one was alert enough to spot a boat in dis­tress. Here it is through binoculars.

That was another stormy, dra­matic week­end, how­ever, and the boat’s prob­lems had more to do with the bru­tal on-shore winds and big waves.

Leav­ing the beach I pho­tographed this sign. I’d noticed it before and almost thought that it was a joke. That day I wasn’t so sure anymore.

The time at the beach with the was dra­matic as all get out, and we sure need the rain. But where there’s rain, there’s weeds.

So this week­end I’ll be spend­ing a lot of the week­end out­side, in the sun, pulling weeds. Absolutely, there are worse things to have to do, but with so many wet week­ends the weeds have got­ten so far ahead of me I hardly know where to start.

Much of the weed­ing will be like this: one tiny lit­tle keeper plant mixed in with dozens of inter­lop­ers. There’s a desert marigold seedling (Bai­leya mul­ti­ra­di­ata) mixed in this mess. Some­where.

I’ll enjoy my time in the sun, but leisure? I think not.

March 13 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: rain • weeding • weeds | 7 Comments »

two saturdays

A cou­ple hours of com­mu­nity ser­vice: Sounds a lit­tle like a sen­tence handed down by a judge, but it was actu­ally how I spent some of last Sat­ur­day. I’ve posted ear­lier about the native plant gar­den at Old Town State His­toric Park. That trip I was walk­ing the paths and enjoy­ing garden.

But this time I was a vol­un­teer help­ing main­tain this inter­est­ing young gar­den. Much of the time I was squat­ted down in the dirt pulling up lit­tle palm trees. If you live in another part of the world you might think that pulling up palm trees is a bizarre thing to do. But palm seedlings are a very real weed around here, espe­cially when there are still actively fruit­ing palms nearby, and when there’s still an active seed­bank left from one of the palms that was removed to make way for the garden.

In just one month since my last visit, the num­ber of flow­ers had dimin­ished as we head into our long brown sea­son when many plants approach dor­mancy. There were some splashy clarkia flow­ers remain­ing, as well as this mal­low from the Chan­nel Islands.

There were other weeds to pull at, and the day ended with a quick prun­ing demon­stra­tion and a demon­stra­tion on one way to main­tain deer grass (Muh­len­ber­gia rigens). With this big, dra­matic grass you can let the stems go brown–which is an easy-maintenance approach to this plant. Or you can reach down on each of the old flow­er­ing stems, feel for a joint a cou­ple inches above the base of the plant, and pull. If you find the node, the stem yanks out with­out much resis­tance. It’s not a chore you can do eas­ily while wear­ing thick gloves, and with­out gloves you’ve likely to shred your hands. For­tu­nately this a grass that looks stately and archi­tec­tural whether or not you pull the dried stems. We left most of the plants as they were.

After just two hours of tidy­ing the gar­den looked even bet­ter and ready for the dry months ahead.

Jump ahead one week…

Even though June is typ­i­cally one of our dry months, today was cool and driz­zly as John and I headed for the Mas­ter Gardener’s plant sale at Bal­boa Park.

We parked near the park’s jumbo More­ton Bay fig (Ficus macro­phylla). It’s an amaz­ing plant, but like many figs, it’s not a good choice if you’re con­cerned about keep­ing your home’s foun­da­tion intact. I was appre­cia­tive of hav­ing the park, a great publicly-funded shared space, where you can go to enjoy spec­tac­u­lar plants that don’t make sense to plant in most home spaces.

Rain or shine, the peo­ple make a trail to this plant sale. This is half an hour before the sale, with all these brave souls stand­ing in the heavy mist wait­ing to get first crack at this year’s offerings.

…and this is dur­ing the first few min­utes of the sale.

Some high­lights this year were bromeli­ads from Bal­boa Park’s prop­a­ga­tion program–big plants for the price of a Happy Meal–and an entire table of dif­fer­ent salvias. As thrilled as I am with the genus salvia, I resisted the temp­ta­tions. No space in the gar­den is no space in the garden.

But John didn’t show the same restraint. He likes his suc­cu­lents. And the more unla­beled the suc­cu­lent is the bet­ter. I swear he does this to drive me crazy, know­ing how much I like my plant names. (The suc­cu­lent expert on site looked at it and said that it’s some sort of cras­sula rel­a­tive, which is what I’d have called it. Okay, we have a fam­ily name, and now only 1400 species to go through… Any help out there?)

Although we didn’t end up drop­ping a lot of change on this sale, many peo­ple with more space in the gar­dens found inter­est­ing plants to pop­u­late their spaces. And the pro­ceeds from the sale go to a good cause.

So these two Sat­ur­days showed a cou­ple way you can help the botan­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions around town. You can donate your labor. Or you can do what comes nat­u­rally for most Amer­i­cans: Go shopping!

June 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Muhlenbergia rigens • native plant gardens • Old Town Historic Park • plant sales • volunteering • weeding • weeds | 5 Comments »

dressed to weed

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.

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

…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.

Chore #2 was to weed one of the patches of bromeli­ads that we’d let loose in the back of a raised bed. 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?

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.

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

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

April 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bromeliads • cats • deadheading • weeding | 6 Comments »

the new spring

Autumn: It’s the new spring.

At least that’s seem­ingly the case for those of us in Mediter­ranean cli­mates. With our dry sum­mers and moist win­ters, the plants best adapted to our cli­mate come close to tak­ing the sum­mer sum­mer off, and then use the onset of cooler, wet­ter weather to start think­ing about get­ting grow­ing again. Some of the shrubs in the local canyons drop some or all of their leaves in response to drought stress, and most of the wild­land annu­als dis­ap­pear not long after the last rains. Our long brown sea­son of sum­mer could almost be con­fused with the depths of win­ter in other areas.

Left: Core­op­sis gigan­tea in its defen­sive, leaf­less sum­mer mode.

Read­ing the recent blogs from those other cli­mates, I’m notic­ing that peo­ple are start­ing to with­draw from their gar­dens, hol­ing up with some favorite plants trans­planted into pots to over­win­ter indoors. These gar­den­ers are think­ing about sit­ting down with plant cat­a­logs and look­ing ahead to the hol­i­days, and then to warmer days and the reemer­gence of their gardens.

Here in San Diego, how­ever, I started off Sep­tem­ber by trans­plant­ing plants around the gar­den, read­just­ing plant spac­ing and color relationships.

Left: Some of the gar­den before and after autumn thin­ning and transplanting.

I planted dozens of lit­tle pots of seeds of plants that I want to grow this fall and next year: giant core­op­sis, datura, buck­wheats from the Chan­nel Islands, mal­lows from the desert, mil­let for the birds and some South African restios for a spot in the gar­den where the orig­i­nal plants haven’t aged grace­fully. It’s a frenzy of activ­ity of the sort that peo­ple in other cli­mates would asso­ciate with late win­ter and early spring.

All sum­mer, the patches of earth that get almost no sup­ple­men­tal water stay brown and vir­tu­ally weed-free. Once the rains return, the weeds begin to claim the uni­verse and the weed­ing chores begin again.

For­tu­nately, a layer of mulch makes a world of dif­fer­ence in keep­ing down weed seedlings. Unfor­tu­nately, areas where you want to sow wild­flower seed can’t be mulched at all if you want the lit­tle seeds to ger­mi­nate on their own. To keep down my work­load, this year I’m iso­lat­ing the wild­flower patches to just a cou­ple spots, around a cou­ple lit­tle trees that will drop their leaves for the win­ter. We’ll see how well that works out…

A few spots in my gar­den don’t have to abide by strictly Mediter­ranean water require­ments. There’s a small herb and veg­etable gar­den that gets mod­er­ate doses of water year-round. A new raised bed har­bors some trop­i­cals that get to stay moist, as well as some other selec­tions that need a lit­tle help with the water. This is the part of the gar­den that gets to expe­ri­ence sum­mer along with the rest of the world. So the task of weed­ing never com­pletely comes to an end, although it’s greatly local­ized to these spots that get watered one to three times a week.

All in all, this 2% of the Earth’s land mass that expe­ri­ences this Mediter­ranean cli­mate (the region around the Mediter­ranean Sea, west­ern South Africa, parts of the Chilean coast, west­ern Aus­tralia, and much of Cal­i­for­nia) has its own sea­sonal cycles that don’t sync up eas­ily with the rest of the world. Gar­den­ers in other areas might not under­stand us. For­give us if we have this glaze of antic­i­pa­tion coat­ing our moods these days. Even as we worry about weeds and increased gar­den chores, fall is here, and it’s the emer­gence of a whole new sea­son in the garden.

November 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • seasons • spring • transplanting • weeding • weeds | 6 Comments »

scorched earth gardening

After my last post I did more research on con­trol­ling Eng­lish ivy. Beyond the commonly-quoted advice to spray with her­bi­cides, or to attempt the mechan­i­cal removal that is occu­py­ing me these days, I saw an inter­est­ing idea for a new but as-yet-untested bio­log­i­cal con­trol Noth­ing imme­di­ately use­ful, unfor­tu­nately. And then I started to see tech­niques that could only be dreamed up by peo­ple like me who’ve been spend­ing too much time fight­ing off Hed­era helix.

From the folks at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, in a dis­cus­sion of ivy, comes:

Pre­scribed burn­ing: An extreme method that has been used with some suc­cess is to burn ivy plants and resprouts with a blow torch at reg­u­lar inter­vals; the energy used by the plant to regrow will even­tu­ally be depleted. Obvi­ously, this approach requires con­sid­er­able caution.

And from Organic Land Care.com comes:

Another more dras­tic method has been to use a blow-torch to repeat­edly blast the plant with a hot flame. By repeat­edly expos­ing the plant to high heat, this method is intended to exhaust the H. helix of its energy so that it is unable to mul­ti­ply or pro­duce berries for repro­duc­tion (Reichard, 2000).

So…fatigued of doing things the old-fashioned way, I went to the garage and got the blow­torch. After aim­ing the flame at some ivy leaves they began to writhe and smoke in a most sat­is­fy­ing way. Soon the leaves started to burn, which sur­prised me since ivy is one of the plants that shows up occa­sion­ally as a rec­om­mended plant for firescap­ing. As the leaves burned, some of the dead grasses around them started to catch fire. Just a lit­tle more heat and I’d have had a lit­tle brush­fire started. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not such a good idea, I started to think, look­ing up at a wood fence not more than two feet away. Damn, it felt good, but I ended the exper­i­ment right then and there–it prob­a­bly wasn’t a good idea to burn down the neighborhood!

March 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: blowtoches • ivy • prescribed burning • weeding • weeds | 1 Comment »

vegetable plutonium

In my more active anti-nuke activist days one of the more com­pelling argu­ments against nuclear power was that some of its byprod­ucts were so long-lived that they would remain lethal for longer than human civ­i­liza­tion has existed. Plutonium-239, for exam­ple, has a half-life of some­thing like 24,000 years, and even a tiny par­ti­cle of it could prove dan­ger­ous to a person.

I was think­ing about that dur­ing my weed­ing exer­cise this week­end, deal­ing with a neglected cor­ner of the gar­den where the neighbor’s Eng­lish ivy had crossed over and under the fence and set up a stand that had spread 20 feet or more into my yard. In the course of its inva­sion, it had con­tributed to a low brick retain­ing wall being pushed over.

The wall the ivy helped push over

I hate to use stuff like Roundup in the yard, but I tried it on the ivy a cou­ple weeks ago. Some of the weeds around it shriv­eled to brown ghosts of them­selves, but at best the ivy showed a lit­tle burn­ing around the edges of the leaves. I’d tried Roundup­ping the ivy before, with sim­i­lar min­i­mal results. Ivy really seems like the thing that wouldn’t die. Some online sites have guide­lines on how to get rid of the stuff, but none of them seem to guar­an­tee easy con­trol. (A cou­ple of the sites I looked at: South­east Exotic Pest Plant Coun­cil Inva­sive Plant Man­ual and the Plant Con­ser­va­tion Alliance’s “Least wanted” pages.)

I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to the alter­na­tive of dig­ging it out by hand, but dig­ging it out by hand was the chore that ate my week­end. And it’s a chore that’ll be occu­py­ing at least a cou­ple more. The job is extra-awful in that even a lit­tle piece of ivy run­ner left in the ground could grow roots and set up a whole new colony. You have to be sure to dig down the foot or so that the run­ners can travel at, and you need to be sure that you’ve rid the patch of all the alien ivy life forms before you move on to the next spade­full. It’s like veg­etable plu­to­nium in that any lit­tle bit left in the ground could prove dan­ger­ous for future gen­er­a­tions. Nasty, evil stuff.

Here you can see the pro­por­tion of dirt to ivy roots…

If my mantra of my teen years was “No nukes!” the mantra of my cur­rent gar­den­ing life has to be “No Ivy!” Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his quote that went some­thing like, “Doctor’s can always bury their mis­takes. Archi­tects can only plant ivy.” Well, friends, doing that would be the great­est mis­take of all.

March 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • quotes | Tags: herbicides • ivy • plutonium • weeding • weeds | 2 Comments »