Maybe My Garden Needs a Gnome

The green stuff growing, intrusively, in my garden

There’s this stuff growing in my garden. It blankets a large portion of the space, and it looks as though I have very carefully strewn seed deliberately across the area. I have not. This is the third year it has come up, and I am dismayed each time. I’m not even sure what it is.

The first year, I though it was purslane. It looks very much like it, and I had had some of that in pots on the front porch. I thought I probably dumped them, dead, into the compost bins at the end of the previous summer. At the beginning of the next spring, I spread that compost over the garden and dug it in. Voila, this stuff started growing, and it was sturdy. When I moaned to April about it, she reminded me that I wanted some ground cover, didn’t I? So just let it grow.

I did, but as the summer plodded on, the plants did not grow nicely and put out flowers. They got leggy and unattractive, and I was glad to see them die off in the winter. Foolishly, I thought that was the end of that. The next spring, a few dandelions came up, as well as those big ol’ prickly things, whatever that awful plant is. Not surprising, as weeds happen, and they weren’t too hard to pull up. But in every other empty space, there was a carpet of that green stuff again! I worked and worked to get it all out. As you can tell by this summer’s photos, I was unsuccessful.

It all came back. It rose again from the garden, strong and green and unwanted, a carpet of tiny, determined seedlings. But this spring, I was busy helping tend another, much more important growing thing in our family, and did not have much time for gardening during the early months.

By the time I was spending more time at home, the weather was really too hot to do much yard work. And, in the heat of summer, most of my efforts go to just keeping alive the things that I’ve planted. Of course, the plants that come up on their own (dandelions, prickly things, pecan trees planted by the squirrels, that small green stuff) are undefeated by the heat. They LOVE it!! They live. Things I plant because I want them in the garden can barely hold on until September.

During what little time I spent in the garden, I did discover that those pesky little plants are much easier to pull when they are bigger, instead of when they are tiny and just coming up. So, I let them grow some and pulled a few of them each day. That was my Mother’s advice about big outdoor projects. Several years ago, as I was trying to get some small rocks (a lot of rocks, actually) from an area in our other yard, she said, “Just take out ten each day. Eventually you’ll get them all out.” I did that, tossing ten every day out into the gravel alley that ran behind our house.

I remember her and daddy working hard in the yard, which was mostly dirt, when we moved there in 1959. They would work and work on Saturdays, getting their nice suburban yard in shape. But I think she also went out every day, maybe two or three times, and pulled up ten weeds and tossed them. So, I’m doing  it, too. I started with ten, and very quickly that didn’t seem enough. I moved to a dozen, and now I’m pulling two dozen from the garden, almost every day. The plants are still small, most of them, and they come out pretty easily, and I can get all the roots. Two dozen doesn’t seem like much, but I’m making headway.

A couple of the ground covers I planted on purpose are still alive. I’ve got some Asian Jasmine that’s surviving its second summer and looking healthy. There’s some Creeping Jenny that’s three summers along now. Maybe I should take a few pieces of that stuff I don’t like to the nursery to see what it is, just to be sure I’m not yanking something desirable from the dirt.

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.
    Luke16:10a (NIV)

I was complaining to Kevin last weekend about a new operating system being available for the phone. It makes me crazy how I have to learn so many new things all at once when that happens (and it seems like it happens so often). “But look” he said. “It will be easy for you. You’ve learned how to post blog entries on your web site. You can edit them and respond to comments. You can add photos and you can send out the weekly reminders. Three months ago, you didn’t know how to do any of that. Now you do. Learning the new phone system will be easy.” I doubt that.

However, I know that I can, eventually, wrap myself around all the changes on the phone and make them work for me. It feels like being faithful to maintain the positive aspects of modern life that keep me in touch with people I care for and informed about the things that are important to me. But, sometimes I feel like I would just rather go out and pull weeds.