It's Murphy's Law, isn't it? Anything that can go wrong will. The day after I started my blog and announced to the world that I'm going to start beautifying my garden, it started to rain, and it rained for the next three days. Rain is good for gardens but bad for gardening, at least if you have a list of jobs you want to do that require digging in the dirt it is. I know from my farm girl days that it's a bad idea to work with your soil when it is soaking wet, because if you do you will pack it down into something resembling a brick, and nothing grows in a brick. So, since since I can't dig in my soil, I've decided to utilize the breaks in the rain to start beautifying above the ground. As things currently stand, that leaves me with two choices: weeding and deadheading. Today I will focus on weeding.
Weeding is a task that I have traditionally found reasons not to do. It is, after all, not the most exciting of jobs, but like anything else, there is a price to be paid for negligence. The price for not weeding is this: exponentially more weeds next year. The years that I have actually had the motivation to weed religiously have been followed by years with noticeably fewer weeds. The years when I have ignored the weeds, just the opposite.
Beyond the propagation effect, the need for weeding is, perhaps, self-explanatory. Weeds steal food and water from, and can crowd out, the plants that you want to have in your garden. They tend to spread prolifically when they find a spot that they like, and, if you aren't careful, within a few years your perennial beds can become weed beds that leave you with little choice but to rip everything out and start completely over. My planting beds have not, yet, gotten to that point, but there are more weeds out there than there should be for two reasons. Reason number one is my aforementioned procrastination, and reason number two is that I have mixed feelings about what constitutes a weed.
I find some of those 'weeds' very beautiful. One of my hobbies is seeking out native plants in the wild places they grow and when I find these plants in my garden I have hard time just pulling them out. I do try to apply some common sense, however. If they are invasive, like thistle or wild violets, they need to go. (Although thistle has an automatic death sentence anyway, because anything that is out to cause me pain has to go!) Anything that is damaging to agricultural crops or the natural environments also has no place in the suburban garden, no matter how far away farms and natural areas seem to be. If you need to know which weeds are noxious in your area, check on your state's Extension Service and Department of Natural Resources websites and you will find lists of noxious weeds.
My last criteria for what gets to stay is simple: I only keep what is beautiful. While many wildflowers are beautiful in their natural environment, some do not hold up well in the garden, either because they don't flower prettily, their foliage is unattractive, or they are not bold enough to hold their own against the domesticated perennials planted around them. When something new shows up, though, I let it go and see how it does. I do not, however, ever take plants or their seeds out of the wild and transplant them into my garden (and neither should you). I let nature decide what to put in my garden and then I decide what to do from there.
As much as I enjoy native plants, I do not believe that true wildflowers are anything that you can solely base a landscape on. Meadows, yes. Suburban landscapes, no. At best most wildflowers only serve as accents to domesticated plants. Wildflowers have minds of their own and will insist on growing where they choose, and not necessarily where you want them to, and most do not transplant well. They also do not, generally, have very long bloom times, and many are small and kind of, well, weedy looking. Still, if I cannot readily identify a seedling, I will let it grow until I know what it is, and then make the decision on whether to keep it or not. By letting wild plants reach maturity (either by design or because I hadn't gotten around to weeding that year), I have made a few fortuitous discoveries. For instance, I have discovered that curly dock looks beautiful when it has gone to seed and looks great in dried arrangements. I have also had a yellow goatsbeard plant blooming in my front flower bed for weeks. Its yellow blooms looked great next to the blue geranium it chose to grow next to.
It is a balancing act, though, because even if you decide to let a plant reach maturity and flower, you need to take care of it before it goes to seed. Anything that you allow to go to seed will be back many times over next year. It's far easier to get rid of one plant this year than it is to get rid of dozens next year.
So, I am watching the weather closely, because it looks like it's going to keep raining for the next few days. Whenever there is a break in the rain I wait for the plants to dry off and get out there and weed. It will take a lot of attention on my part, but the silver-lining is that it is much easier to pull a plant out of wet ground than it is out of dry. It's always good to count those blessings.
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