Wimp Weed Assault!

When our backs were turned away from our garden and doing other things, our garden exploded! Including the weeds.

Now you need to know, we usually do little gardening in August. It is the month to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our April and May labors. But this year, everything garden-wise has been topsy-turvy.

April meant the ground remained still frozen. Pea pods, usually planted on April 1st, would have required an auger to drill holes in order to drop wrinkled seeds into the ground. Of course with such cold soil, even peas would not have germinated.

By the end of May, many perennials still had not come up - leading us to wonder how much loss we suffered due to the harsh winter. And making gardening difficult, due to our hesitation to dig in bare places for fear we might destroy any chances of life for what had been there a year ago.

By mid-June, most everything had pushed its way into the light. It was much like years of gardening in the Northwoods, where the growing season is short and long daylight hours compensated, still giving us lush tomatoes by mid-August.

This June was monsoon-month, when records for amounts of rainfall were broken right and left. The good part of all the deluges was that it broke the drought from last year - in which it was as if someone turned off the rain-spigot on a specific date during the late summer.

After all the weather commotion this summer, our garden plants must have held a meeting and decided to go for broke in July. Stuff grew taller and bigger than it ever had. The hostas were especially spectacular - with some leaves as big or bigger than extra-large dinner plates.

But gardening is not meant to be toiling away every waking hour during the summer that we dreamt about in January. There are other things that need doing in life. We traveled some - and when we returned, it was evident we had some serious work to do. No sitting around this August!

Which brings me to wimp weed. W have no idea what its "official name" is. Nor have other gardeners we have asked. But when we describe  the weed, serious gardeners know exactly what we mean. This demon weed rampages through gardens. It is wimp weed's capacity to produce a million seeds on each small  plant - and scatter them over the entire garden that makes it a weed with NO friends.

Wimp weed is a nice green, has pretty leaves, and likes to hide out where it thinks it can't be seen. It pulls out very easy (hence our name for it: wimp weed), not like some stubborn weeds that resist - and who believe they have a constitutional right to reside in their chosen places.

So I can say today, we now are relatively wimp-free. That is until the next batch shows up sometime during the week.

Like an Aesop's fable, this story has a moral. Though we might treasure having a wide variety of people in our lives, there are some folks who behave like wimp weed - running rampant over everyone with whom they come into contact. And though it sounds harsh, it is those folks that we must learn to recognize and remove them from our lives, in exchange for mutually loving and giving relationships, so precious and necessary for our well-being.