Pickles by Brian Crane for September 23, 2013

White fuzzy dandelions.

I bet there a bunch of zucchini in there againthis ear.

Babies’ Breath?

A “weed” is simply a plant growing where you don’t want it. This includes plants for which no commercial use has yet been found.

My kind of garden!

If you like the plant, keep it.

Several seed companies (e.g. Johnny’s Select Seeds) sell the seeds for commonly unwanted plants such as chicory, dandelion, milkweed, nettle, and purslane. .Weeds want so badly to grow. I often feel sorry for them and let them live for a while. Unfortunately, they usually don’t have the nice forms in maturity that cultured flowers and ground covers have..Plus, if you live in a subdivision where people spend money on landscaping and lawn care they will make nasty comments or call the village board on you.

Clover is a weed?

We had a saying when I lived in Arizona that if it blossomed and looked pretty, chances are it was either a weed or a cactus.

British commentators here who know their Kipling probably have heard this poem before, “The Glory of the Garden.” It was excerpted and read by James Mason in a nice little documentary about Exbury Gardens:.http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_garden.htm

“Blissfully sparse” – how I describe my acreage in South Dakota. Although there are fines for “noxious weeds,” I haven’t gotten one yet. And I have all of them!

I love dandelions and welcome them in my meadow (I refuse to have a lawn). I am still debating whether to let them grow in my garden, though. My garden and meadow are filled with native and waterwise species that attract wildlife, including bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. About half of my neighbors like my approach. The other half find wildlife to be frightening and meadows to be untidy.

@janinabarnesMuch to the dismay of my snowbird transplant neighbors, when I lived in Florida and in Arizona, I had a natural landscape. If it wasn’t supposed to be there, it wasn’t. Grass was natural not transplanted. Flowers, shrubs and trees were native or non-invasive. In Florida, I had almost an acre of pine, southern oak, palmettos etc, surrounding my house, and actually had large trees in my yard ( anyone who lives in Florida will attest to the predilection of construction companies to ‘bush hog’ almost everything off a lot ).As a result, in both places, wildlife flourished. And my Florida backyard visitors included everything from bobcats to hummingbirds.

I like any flower. Dandelions look too pretty to be weeds even though they are.

xxx

I would often ask mom what flowers were growing in her garden. She would always answer “weeds”. Then tell me the name of each weed.

I’m allergic to dandelions but I refuse to blanket spray nasty pesticides—for one thing I have roses and for another I like the clover, violets, etc. (when we had invasive willows sending runners from our neighbor’s yard into ours and tearing up concrete I painted their leaves and dabbed their cut stems with the right herbicide) so to keep the danelions down I just send my kids out after them. .I pay them 1 cent per 5 dandelions found and they have a grand old time, I have fewer allergies, and the things don’t spread and make me even more miserable.

I can tell you why that is! The answer is here:

Genesis 3:17–1917 Then to Adam God said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:

“Cursed is the ground for your sake;In toil you shall eat of itAll the days of your life.18Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,And you shall eat the herb of the field.19In the sweat of your face you shall eat breadTill you return to the ground,For out of it you were taken;For dust you are,And to dust you shall return.”

We call things ‘weeds’ if they grow and spread easily (because then they won’t stay precisely where we put them). It is a definition problem.