Battling Bindweed - Not the Moral Story I Thought It Was




 Convolvulus Arvensis 

Bindweed. My nemesis. Visible evidence of my moral failure to work hard enough at pulling the weeds in my flowerbeds and garden. 

It drills up through layers of cardboard and mulch. It chokes the rhubarb, knots the roses, buries the gnomes.  

Wishing to acquit myself of such public laziness, I resolved that this year, I would rise in the cool of the mornings, patiently enduring the skeeters that bite through long sleeves and jeans, and pull these weeds. I would do one flower bed at a time, maybe half a flower bed a day. I'd do them in rotation. That should take care of them.

After a week or so of this, I came back to the first bed. It was again covered in weeds. Oh well, I would just have to be more diligent than the weeds.

 I told myself it was a case of Good, Better, Best: Good would be to scrape the evidence of the weeds from the surface. Better would be to pull up the white root. Best would be to catch the runner root 6 or 7 inches down. I slowed my efforts to make sure I got as much root as I could. And I recruited my grandson to do the same.

Still the Bindweed returned. Thicker and denser than before. I could not keep up.

Today, I learned that the reason I could not keep up with the bindweed is because what I thought was "Better" and "Best" was actually making the situation worse.

Pulling Bindweed, breaking up the roots (or worse yet, tilling them!) only encourages the root to sprout more leaves. A piece of root even 1" long can resprout the weed. Bindweed root systems live far deep underground (some sources say 20-40 feet), and are full of the sugars collected over years of patient photosynthesis. Damaging the roots in any way causes the bindweed to send out growth stimulating hormones, rallying the stores of sugars to make more shoots.

Well, I can't have the bindweed killing the roses and choking the rhubarb.

It turns out that the most effective physical method (chemicals work better, but not until the late summer) is to snip off the stems where they exit the ground, so as to deprive the system of the photosynthetic leaves without triggering an overabundance of growth. The weed has to use its sugar stores to try to catch light somewhere else.

So off to Menard's (where we jokingly parody the everpresent earworm as "You'll spend money, you'll spend big money, when you shop Menard's"... because I think we're at Menards almost daily, and sometimes 2-3 times a day), where I got a couple of garden shears of various sizes. I'll try the snipping thing for a while.

And I'll try not to feel that the ubiquitousness of bindweed is a moral failure. 

There are probably other moral stories to be had here. I'm not sure I'm ready to decide what they are, though.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part 8: The Six Young Ladies in the Middle

Image
  PART 8: The Six Young Ladies in the Middle Young Adult Mennonite Group Attends  Farmington Chautauqua, August 1910 By Elizabeth Hervey Osborn Part 1  --   Part 2  --  Part 3  --  Part 4  --  Part 5  --  Part 6  -- Part 7 -- Part 8 The youngest attendees were the four close friends clustered at the center of the middle row. With two older ladies at the ends of their row, it is almost as though their older cousins were protectively surrounding them.   In this last installment, I present here a closer look at their remarkable lives. Dora Katherine Krebill 1886-1972 (4HB, FamilySearch K4GQ-QK4. Find-a-Grave 1160127272) Twenty-three year old Dora was Walter’s older sister, born to Joseph Krebill and Selma Magdalena Weber in 1886 near Donnellson Iowa.  Marriage would not be in Dora's future, but family was everything to her. For decades she helped organize and gather her Krebill cousins - descendants o...
Read more

Part 3: Chautauqua -- The Original TED Talk

Image
  PART 3: Chautauqua -- The Original TED Talk [ 1] Young Adult Mennonite Group Attends Farmington Chautauqua, August 1910 By Elizabeth Hervey Osborn Part 1  --   Part 2  --  Part 3  -- Part 4 -- Part 5 -- Part 6 -- Part 7 -- Part 8 “The most American thing in America,” Teddy Roosevelt supposedly said [2] , was the Chautauqua Movement. Before the days of internet, television, radio, and moving pictures, rural folk had a strong appetite for more knowledge on important cultural, political, and philosophical matters of the day. In the years following the United States Civil War, Methodist church leaders concerned about the quality of adult education organized an annual gathering of Sunday School teachers near Chautauqua Lake, New York, where they brought in the best thinkers and speakers they could find. The gatherings at Chautauqua Lake became an “educational and cultural retreat” for idea-thirsty people of many denominations. [3] Sharp-eyed businessm...
Read more

Part 2: Farmington, Iowa

Image
PART 2: Farmington, Iowa Young Adult Mennonite Group Attends Farmington Chautauqua, August 1910 By Elizabeth Hervey Osborn Part 1 --   Part 2  --  Part 3  -- Part 4 -- Part 5 -- Part 6 -- Part 7 -- Part 8 North of the Des Moines River, near where the border between Iowa and Missouri leaves the  river valley to shoot westward over rolling hills, rests the village of Farmington, Iowa. At the turn of the 20 th century more people lived in Farmington [1] than in the county seat [2] sixteen miles upriver, its prominence fueled by the modern electric light plant, woolen mill, pants factories, flour mills, repair shops, coal mines, quarries, and several vinegar and pickle factories, in addition to the general agriculture of the region. [3] Two passenger and freight lines intersected downtown. The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad (the “Burlington Route”) served routes east and west. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad (the “Rock Island”) ran ...
Read more