I don’t have normal weeds, then again, I don’t have your typical garden either. Remember I’m carving my garden out of a section of weeds, I mean woods.
When I think of the woods I think of several inches of rich moist leaf matter scattered below a lovely canopy of trees. I think of understory trees and native flowers scattered through out and sun light being gently filtered onto the forest floor. That however is not my reality.
This is my reality. A mess of weeds that I don’t know what they are, plus the ones that I do know and hate with a passion! Japanese honeysuckle and oriental bittersweet mat the ground, climb and choke the trees and are growing like mad up the deer fence. Dog rose is easy enough to get up when the ground is wet and I’m double gloved. More shrubs to pull out are Japanese barberry and Euonymus alatus, a.k.a. burning bush. There are also these stinking trees and by stinking I mean they smell bad. They are sprouting all over the place and they are as hard as heck to pull up. Oh and the poison ivy there is so much of it, I’ve never seen so much in my garden or the woods in all the time we’ve lived here! The worst is the Japanese stilt grass and now some sort of other grass that is similar but bigger and wavy.
Complicating this issue is the fact that there are indeed native plants fighting to survive in all this mess, American Holly saplings, Mayapples, Jack in the Pulpit, Solomons seal and Virginia creeper. Further around in here are ferns and birds foot violets and some other delicate wildflowers that bloom in the early spring.
Ideally, I’d love to just take a brush mower through here and be done with it. My conscience won’t let me though because I think about the critters that live in the leaves and well, by hand it is.
I pulled, tugged, ripped and yanked my way through and if I left it, it’s because it’s a native plant, (or possibly I missed it). Most of what I left is Maple leafed viburnums, they are everywhere and I’m okay with that. It’s a native, it makes berries for the birds and flowers for the pollinators and is very pretty.
The next overcast day I’ll be back at it!
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