Crystal Ball, May 4, 2011

Garden battles

Why is it, the first plant to poke its head out of the cold, damp spring soil has to be a dandelion?

After months of living with a white, frozen landscape or at least one dominated by brown and gray, it’s exiting to see the first green, growing thing return.

Oh look! Something’s coming up!

Then it turns out to be a weed.

Dandelions get a bad rap. I think their leaves are supposed to have a spicy flavor that’s good in salads and the folks in Amana make wine out of the flowers. The rest of us just spend a lot of time trying to kill them. We might be better off trying to turn them into food and drink instead.

Weeds aside, this is an exciting time of year for gardeners. We’re nearing the frost-free date we’ve been obsessing about since two days after Christmas when an avalanche of gardening catalogs hit our mailboxes.

It’s almost time to start planting vegetable gardens and flowerbeds and setting out bedding plants.

I haven’t made up my mind about the tomato issue this year. I don’t have a vegetable garden, exactly, more like a couple of tomatoes in pots. Last summer, it didn’t go so well. First, the wind knocked them over. Then one of my dogs knocked them over. Then the bugs chewed on them in spite of my chemical assault. Then both dogs spent the rest of the summer eating the tomatoes as fast as they ripened, which mean I had to quit the chemical assault, which meant the dogs and the bugs were getting more tomatoes than I was. Fencing was useless.

This summer, I may pick my battles. Farmers’ markets are looking mighty appealing. I’ll let someone else fight the wind, the bugs and crazy dogs and I’ll be happy to pay them for their efforts.

But right now, I’d just like to get ahead of the weeds before they get ahead of me. With all the rain we’ve had, that’s a tall order.

Remember the hare bells (weed masquerading as a flower) I battled last summer? They’re back, them and their roots that grow half way to China. I noticed last week that several clumps have sprung up again in defiance of my assault last autumn. At least the recent rains should make digging and pulling relatively easy. And I already have a bottle of Roundup on my shopping list.

Grass seed is on that list, too. I don’t know why I obsess so much about planting something that is only going to create more work. One patch of lawn really took a hit from moles last fall. If the moles weren’t bad enough, my dogs tried digging them up. There was a lot of digging and very little catching, which only increased the lawn wreckage.

But now warm weather and another growing season are ahead of us and hope springs eternal.