Crabgrass.
Here it is at the edge of my garden, waiting to send it's little creepers out amongst the plants.
What appears to be simply a thriving crop of crabgrass is actually a row of potatoes; yes, there are potatoes under all those weeds. The pile in the foreground is what I pulled this morning.
Here's a young crabgrass plant, already infiltrating my late cabbage plants.
On the left is my strawberry bed. And this is the reason I may forget about raising strawberries. What does one do with weeds that have so infiltrated a crop?
This is how my hands look after waging war on crabgrass plants for over an hour. I have gardening gloves, and I know the trick about getting soap under the fingernails before you go outside. The thing is, I usually don't go outside with the intention of pulling weeds... I may be heading to the mailbox or walking the dog. Then I see the horrible weeds and start pulling.
Because of the moisture in the soil, it's fairly easy to pull this weed, but it's impossible to get rid of it. It sends out runners both above and below the surface of the ground and reproduces itself like mad.
This year has been especially bad for all sorts of weeds because of all the rain we've gotten. A large portion of the grass growing in our yard has always been crabgrass, but we just mow it and pretend it's bluegrass.
We've been using a huge borrowed pet taxi for Iris to sleep in at night; it's been beside our bed, taking up an incredible amount of room. Iris had no complaints about it; if I told her to go to bed and the door of the taxi was almost closed, she'd stick her nose in and open the door, squeezing through.
We also have a too-small pet taxi that we used to transport Sadie in the car; Iris is the same size Sadie was, so that one is too small for her to use as a bed, although it works fine for taking her someplace in the car.
I've been watching garage sales for a just-right-sized pet taxi Iris can comfortably sleep in; I certainly didn't intend to pay the price for a new one.
Cliff was putting some stuff in a storage shed in the pasture and noticed a pet carrier back in the shadows. "Did you know there's a dog crate down there that's the size you want?"
Neither of us have any memory of acquiring that thing, but sure enough, there it was.
The metal door is rusty, and I had to clean out lots of wasp nests. It isn't the prettiest thing I ever brought into the house; but after some cleanup, I figure it will serve Iris just fine until we find a better one at a garage sale.
This picture shows the difference between the sizes of the two pet carriers.
On another note, this morning I plugged the electric fencer in and it was dead as a doornail. Where it usually reads "14.4" or something in that range, it read "0.0". We had not been using it for a couple of weeks because the removal of the old trailer house also entailed the removal of the source of electricity to our barn. Yesterday the barn was re-wired to our box.
Although I was fairly confident that "0.0" meant there was a worse problem than a few weeds on the wire, I decided to eliminate that possibility while Cliff was asleep. That way he can go on to other possible problems.
There definitely were plenty of weeds on the electric fence. However, after I had removed the weeks, the fencer still reads "0.0".
This electric fence runs along our side of the barbed wire fence between us and the neighbor to the west; his horses, lacking decent pasture, eat over the fence and lean on it so hard that they'd eventually push it down. We string the electric fence along it in such a way that whether they eat between the barbed wire strands or over the top, they'll get a shock.
Our cows have a selection of any variety of grass or legumes they might want; so where did I find them eating this morning? In the idle field Cliff intends to plant to grass this fall, where nothing but weeds can be found at the present time. In this picture, Bonnie has a mouthful of the vine my daddy always called "Creeping Jenny". Weeds! My cows like weeds!
Speaking of weeds and vines, here is the trumpet vine I've been trying to get established for two years; it suffered a serious setback in the spring of 2009 when a nephew mowed it; I then marked it with an electric fencepost to keep such a tragedy from happening again. This is a plant many people have warned me about, saying it's invasive. So I put it in a place where it should remain harmless, and yet I can sit on my porch and watch when the hummingbirds are feasting on its blossoms. I have yet to see a bloom, but I'm sure I will eventually.
I recently put a "butterfly bush" in my flowerbed; I understand that's another plant that can sometimes be invasive. I'm not worried; my husband loves to kill plants, and if it becomes a problem, I'll turn him loose on it.
Every day when Cliff and I take our walk, on the way past the field he planted in grass last fall, he'll say something like this: "I gotta get out here with the hoe and get those dad-gummed broad-leaf weeds."
Three years ago when a late freeze killed most of the alfalfa in this little plot, weeds took over. And although Cliff disked the area repeatedly last summer, we would see big plants waving in the breeze, thumbing their noses at us.
This morning when Cliff said, "I intended to get out here with the hoe and get those dad-blamed broadleaf weeds, but it looks like it ain't gonna happen," I thought, "Maybe he's hinting for me to do it."
So after planting some trees and tilling the garden this morning, I headed out with my trusty hoe. From where we took our walk, we'd seen perhaps a half-dozen of the big weeds; I figured it wouldn't take long to get rid of them so Cliff could find something new to talk about on our walks.
Bonnie and Sir Loin followed me in and started enjoying the new grass; you wouldn't think there were any broadleaf weeds there, would you? Just lovely, green grass, waving in the breeze.
Once inside the electric-fenced patch, though, I saw there were dozens... perhaps hundreds... of the dad-blamed weeds They were just getting established, so they were too small to see from our path.
The trouble is, when I use the hoe to get rid of them, the root is still there to send up another plant. We hate to use a broadleaf weed killer, since we inter-seeded clover there last winter.
It almost makes me want to move to town.
