Wednesday, September 18, 2013

A bucket full of sour dock seeds

Cliff and I were walking past the clover field and noticed the invasive Dock weeds were taking over once again.  
"I need to come back here and mow," Cliff said.  
"The seeds are already there; looks to me like if you mowed, the seeds would just lie there until next spring and germinate and grow a new crop."  
He agreed.
I decided to take my nippers back to that field and wage a war on sour dock.  I took the bucket you see above and started cutting off the seed heads.  Cliff considers it "mission impossible", but by george, every bucketful holds thousands of seeds that won't fall to the ground and grow.  
Those brown seed-heads are ready to fall now, so I handle them carefully as I put them in the bucket.  When the bucket is full, I take them to our junk ditch and toss them over the edge.  
I've cleared about 10 percent of the field of the seed heads, and probably won't come close to getting them all before all the seeds dry up and drop to the ground.  But there's an old saying, "Do something, lest ye do nothing."  
Well, I'm doing something.  At least the several thousand seeds I removed will be that many that don't reproduce.  It's sort of like when I use the Furminator on Iris.  I work on her for ten minutes, getting handfuls of dog hair that flutter and blow around the yard, enough hair to make a puppy, it would seem.  She comes in the house and shakes, and  just as much hair flies as it did before all my work.  But I tell myself with each handful of  hair I remove outside, "At least this is 5,000 hairs that won't be in my house."    

6 comments:

  1. Can you be allergic to sour dock seeds? Looks like something that would cause my allergies to go haywire.

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  2. I believe that is possible. Seems like I saw something about that in my Google search.

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  3. That is a good effort. It would kill me because of my allergies, but I hope it makes a difference to your field.

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  4. That looks like mission impossible. Good luck with it.

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  5. Hope it makes a difference.

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  6. P.S. When I first read your heading and saw the picture, I thought, "Well, this should be good. 'Cause why would ANYONE want a bucket full of sour dock heads!"

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