Spring is coming – honest, and with the change in the weather the cold season weeds are ready to explode. I usually have a very nice selection of early season weeds. I thought I’d just share a few…
I’m not sure everyone calls them by the same common name, so I added botanical names – even though I hate giving them any sort of respectability.
Right now I have tons of Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine Hirsute). This is a winter annual that gets little white flowers on pretty tall stems. The flowers turn into these long seed pods. When the seeds are ripe, the pods explode when disturbed – shooting the seeds all over. Apparently, the seeds can fly up to 16 feet! The best way to manage them is to pull them before they make seeds, but in my garden they like to hide inside other plants. I think I’ll have them forever.
Another weed growing now is Purple Deadnettle (Lamium pupureum). I get this all around the edges of my vegetable garden and flower beds. It has square stems – always a warning sign because square stems belong to the mint family, usually very hardy and fast growers. It gets pretty blue flowers, but it’s dangerous to let it go too long. I try to pull it out of my vegetable beds whenever I see it and I put it in my brush pile, not my compost so it does not re-root.
I think my most hateful weed (at least this time of the year) is Creeping Charlie (Glechoma Hedoracea), also known as ground ivy. This weed is a bit of a thug.
It continues to grow in cold weather while many other things are dormant – twining its way around, over and under all the other plants, smothering them. It grows over and under barriers, through small cracks in raised beds, and roots all along its stem.
Usually I can work this weed out from around other plants, but sometimes I have to dig up the desired plant, untangle the creeping charlie and then replant.
Some say a weed is just a plant out of place, and its true that some plants we call weeds are actually very valuable to native insects and pollinators (like common violets for instance).
My approach is to try to maintain a kind of peace between my desired plants and the weeds. I think its OK to have a few weeds here and there.
