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Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make
haste.
- William Shakespeare -
see What's
Coming Up #14 and What's
Coming Up #52
Below: Pokeweed (Phytolacca
americana) and dandelion get the jump on invited garden
members.
It takes...a lot of weeds in a garden
really to keep the gardener interested. ...God in His wisdom
provided thorns and thistles.
- Bertha Damon, in A Sense of
Humus -
see What's
Coming Up #106
Repetitive activities such as
weeding might look tedious
and unfulfilling to the
uninitiated but they can
attain a certain rhythm,
become a...
moving meditation.
- Ken Druse, in A Passion For
Gardening -
see Growing
Concerns #763 and What's Coming Up #99
Left: She's been gardening for going on
80 years and her favorite tool is an old
screwdriver. It fits her hand and does
the trick on tap rooted weeds
along the walk.
...better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.
- Rudyard Kipling, The Glory of the
Garden, 1911 -
...weeding is the most peaceful of any
outdoor task... soothingly monotonous but pleasingly varied...
shutting out anxious thinking and furnishing an excuse for not
doing some other less pleasant job.
- Bertha Damon, in A Sense of
Humus -
see What's
Coming Up #153
Know your weeds. Because, as the old
saying goes:
It is always more powerful to curse it by name.
-Frances Kissinger
-
see Growing Concerns #769 and
What's Coming Up #173
The only thing that can make the
average gardener industrious, that can make him come out early and
fold up late, is the industrious weed.
- Bertha Damon, in A Sense of
Humus -
see What's Coming Up
#99
Weeding has none of the doubts and
fears of transplanting.
- Bertha Damon, in A Sense of
Humus -
see What's
Coming Up #110
A weed is a plant whose virtues have
not yet been discovered.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson -
see Growing Concerns #762,
What's Coming Up #47
and What's Coming Up #100
Go thou and like an executioner cut
off the heads of too fast growing sprays.
- William Shakespeare, in Richard II
-
see What's Coming
Up #132
As the weeder gets acquainted with
weeds, he may well take an example from their virtuous and
admirable behavior.
- Bertha Damon, in A Sense of
Humus -
see What's
Coming Up #84
Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that
towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my
weapon and rolled in the dust.
- Henry Thoreau, of weeding in his
Walden bean field -
see What's Coming Up #87
Teasel. Ha. One year you have one; the next year
you have 10,000.
- Beaufort Cranford -
Above: Lambsquarters, an annual weed, is such a prolific
seed producer that even one plant left to ripen seed can fulfill
the Farmer's warning, "One year's weeds, seven years'
seeds."
To confound the issue, however: We have seen that finches and
other small birds really love lambsquarter seed. Dozens forage
below on a single big lambsquarter gone to seed. (In case your eyes
can't make sense of the image at first, scroll down to see a small
section enlarged, with birds' heads indicated.)
Some plants are real demons, but are so pretty there's a lot of
demand for them. We growers have to carry them. So we sell them
with a warning!
- Karen Bovio -
See Bad luck to say
thanks
Invasive? Sure, it can be. We told
you that. But isn't it otherwise all that you asked for?
- Janet -
See Bad luck to say
thanks
When I had a small yard I had to be
so careful of what I let loose in there. I tell people if someone
offers you a perennial, ask them 'Why?" If they say 'because I have
so much of it,' well there you go, there's your warning!
- Deb Hall -
See Bad luck to say
thanks