The definition of a weed is a plant out of place. In my garden, out of place can be measured by less than an inch: grass in the lawn is good and grass in the garden, on the other side of my imposed line, is a weed.
I’ve been trying not to overdo it, but pulling weeds requires stamina. It also requires:
A place to put your feet or knees close enough to the weed to get leverage and a foam kneeling pad for hard ground.A tool to help you loosen the soil so most of the root will come out, such as a soil knife (otherwise known as a hori hori), a dandelion digger or in extreme cases, a shovel.Moist soil, but not mud — maybe you irrigated it the day before.Weed ID-ing skills, especially when weeds are in the infant stage and easy to pull out, but distinguishable from the seedlings you are encouraging to grow.Knowing when and how to use herbicides — even Douglas Tallamy, the native plant guru, admits there are weeds like Russian thistle that need a little poison on a cut stem.Deciding when a plant is a weed.Milkweed
The Habitat Hero demonstration garden by the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens flagpole is in its ninth growing season. The most successful native flower species is showy milkweed. However, the CBG horticulturists would prefer it didn’t go to seed and blow into other flower beds via those nifty little silky parachutes. All the seed pods were harvested before they opened last year.
This season I’m trying something new there, popping out milkweed stems whenever they are growing in the middle of another bunch of flowers, encouraging them in particular locations to form big bouquets, especially close to the sidewalk so people can enjoy the intricate flowers and the critters they attract.
One minute I am popping milkweed out stem by stem and the next minute I am digging out its roots so it can be transplanted where it is wanted by another gardener. It’s an experiment — will popping eventually reduce the number of new sprouts? Can milkweed be transplanted?
Hairy goldenaster
Official designation as a noxious weed does matter in agriculture. The Laramie Weed and Pest Board has designated the nontoxic plant, hairy goldenaster, Heterotheca villosa, as such so that ranchers, whose cattle won’t eat it, can apply to Weed and Pest for cost sharing of pesticides to kill it.
It’s a tough plant that likes tough places and comes up smiling with a wreath of small golden flowers. I grow it in my garden. It’s become important in range restoration projects and in native plant circles, with a pound of seed going for $500.
A local native plant propagator would like to grow it as a crop and sell it, but she can’t until Weed and Pest changes its designation. We are the only county in the country that has the designation and no one knows how that happened. But I think there is a compromise available between rancher and farmer if it is delisted.
Since hairy goldenaster frequently grows in tandem with other designated noxious weeds, the rancher could name the other weeds in his pasture in his application for pesticide funding. Or he could invite the would-be hairy goldenaster farmer to come out and collect seed in his pasture and ask for a cut of her sales.
Short, frequent weeding sessions best
I still have some turf-looking areas in my home flower beds that will take a few more hours of intense work, but eventually, they will be like the Habitat Hero garden, requiring only minutes a week to find the usual culprits, in this case, thistle and bindweed. A week-old thistle plant, if you grab it at the soil surface, “petting” the young prickles against the stem, isn’t too prickly. With firm but constant pressure, and maybe a little help from your hand tool to loosen the soil around it, it can be pulled with root intact.
I’m not a fan of disturbing the soil with a rototiller — that usually just exposes more weed seeds to sunlight and gives you more weeds. For vegetable gardening, thick mulch is your friend.
My regular inspection of the Habitat Hero garden, in addition to identifying weeds, includes picking up the odd bits of litter that blow in, usually white colored and easy to spot. But sometimes the white bits are bindweed flowers saying, “Ha-ha, you missed me!” You can’t believe how it twines and hides within a perfectly innocent aster, but at least bindweed can’t help but bloom and give itself away.
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