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Plants to Avoid If You Can
Wild parsnips often grow along the roadside. Many people are easily burned by the sap.
Avoid wild parsnips because you can get terrible burns from the sap of this plant. When the sap on you is hit by bright sunshine, most people develop painful blisters. This is unfortunate, as this common plant is spread by seed, often creating large patches in fields and along roadsides. If you get sap on you, wash it off with soap and water immediately, cover the area, and stay out of direct sunshine for 48 hours.
Giant hogweed is an invasive that can burn you with its sap.
Giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) is in the same family as parsnips, but is bigger, harder to get rid of, and even more toxic. I saw it for sale some 20 years ago and was intrigued by its size (6 to 12 feet tall) and blossoms that are up to three feet across. I bought it and planted it, having been told that it was not a perennial, though it is.
Buttercups are pretty but tough to control
Another pest I have will surprise you, perhaps: buttercups (Ranunculus repens). Like some of the others mentioned above, at first I welcomed this bright harbinger of spring which displays cheerful yellow blossoms. But it has become a problem because it spreads not only by root, but by seed, and once established it is difficult to weed out. And it will choke out other plants. It is glorious in bloom, but very tenacious. If you have moist, rich soil in part shade, watch out. I’d advise removing it early before it starts crowding out other plants. This one is native to Europe, but there are native species that are not a problem, I am told.
Goutweed will outcompete any other plants and is difficult to eradicate
I dug out all the goutweed, took away the soil down to 12 inches and replaced the soil after putting down a heavy weed mat. Still … 5 years later it crawled out from under the mat. If you have it, accept you will probably always have it, though with persistence and a good weeding tool, it is possible to control. But I wouldn’t buy a house that has it!
5 Things You MUST DO in the Vegetable Garden This Weekend – or Soon
Okay, nobody likes to be told what they have to do. Or when they have to do it, so I apologize for telling you what to do. And you don’t really have to do these things immediately, but doing them soon will help you later on.
- It’s time to thin root crops- my least favorite task in the garden. But by now carrots, beets, parsnips and so forth need to be thinned in order for them to develop well.
- You need to put in your tomato supports to keep the plants off the ground, either tying them to stakes or surrounding them with wire cages.
- You need to hill up your potatoes if they have six to twelve inches of green growth by now.
- Cut off those tall flower spikes from your rhubarb. Quick, easy, productive.
- Weed.
Beets ready for thinning
Let’s take a look at each of these tasks. First, it’s important to thin root crops that are too close. I’m assuming you planted these frost hardy plants in late April or May, and they have gotten to be 3 inches or so tall by now. They’re big enough that you don’t have to wear your reading glasses to distinguish individual plants.
Carrots and beets can compete with each other just as they would have to compete with weeds. Nutrients from the soil, water, even sunshine is minimized if veggies are too close. So thin your carrots and beets to an inch apart now, and 2 to 3 inches in a month. Yes, you can get a crop without thinning, but the production is vastly reduced. And you can eat the thinnings.
Beets seeds are actually seed capsules with 2 to 3 seeds inside each one. So no matter how well you space your seeds, you will need to thin them. There are monogerm beets like ‘Moneta’ from Johnny’s Selected Seeds that only have one beet embryo per seed capsule, but those are rare. You can re-plant the thinnings, but it’s not always successful. Take a pencil, poke a hole, drop in the roots of the beet, and firm up the soil. Or you can just eat the beet greens.
When I was young and very busy raising kids, I didn’t stake up all my tomatoes. Some I let flop over and lay on piles of straw. Those on the ground suffered from diseases much more than those I caged. I now use 4-legged cages that are 54 inches tall – the biggest commercially available.
This year a friend gave me a home-made cage made from sheep fencing. The fencing is made into a 24-inch cylinder that stands 48 inches tall. Each cage needs a 6-foot grade stake to keep it from tipping over and openings that are big enough for your hand to pass through to pick tomatoes. I’ll decide if this cage is worth replicating next year.
Depending on the weather and where you garden, it may be time to hill your potatoes. This means adding soil over the planted seed potatoes. Roots go down from the seed potato, and new potatoes form above the seed potatoes. If you want lots of potatoes, there has to be room for them to grow. So adding soil from the walkways or your compost pile is essential to having enough depth for good production. Another way to do that is to pile on a thick layer of hay or straw, a technique I am trying with some of my potatoes.
Rhubarb with seeds ready to cut off
Rhubarb, I have heard, is one of the last flavors to be lost by the elderly as their senses diminish. That’s why, I suppose, that homes for the elderly serve rhubarb desserts at this time of the year. It’s very easy to grow- once established there is little to do other than occasionally add some compost to the soil, or to scratch in some organic fertilizer.
By now, however, rhubarb is sending up tall shoots with white flowers to produce seeds. They are quite spectacular as flowers go – they grow as fast as Jack’s proverbial beanstalks. But like all seeds, they consume energy and minerals from the soil, so it makes sense to cut them down.
Last, but not least, you need to weed. You know that. I find that if weeding becomes a regular part of you day – like brushing your teeth or making your bed – the weeds will not overcome your garden. Even 10 or 15 minutes a day will make a huge difference.
Right now I have been concentrating on tall, deep-rooted weeds like dandelions and burdock. I find that since the soil is moist down deep, it is easier to get these weeds more easily than later in the summer when the soil is dry. I use a garden fork to loosen the soil down a foot or more, then apply even, gentle pressure pulling on the top of the plant. Most come out all in one piece. That’s good, as a broken tap root will send a new plant up later.
Deep rooted weeds pull nicely when soil is wet
Never let weeds go to flower or set seeds. If nothing else, snip or pull off the flowers to keep the weeds from producing seeds. If you have particularly virulent weeds like goutweed, dispose of the flower heads in the trash going to the incinerator or land fill. Some weeds can produce viable seeds even after being pulled or having their flowers cut off.
So get busy in your vegetable garden. There’s lots to do.
Read Henry’s twice weekly blog at https://dailyuv.com/
Weeding
I love weeding. It creates order out of chaos, something I have come to appreciate. An un-weeded flower bed is full of distractions. My brain is constantly instant messaging me: “See that dandelion? You should pull it”. The weeds distract me from the beauty of the flowers and the texture and color of the leaves. I feel better as soon as I get my weeds pulled. That said, I still have weeds. Maybe I need to retire from writing a column!
Weeding also makes my plants thrive. Weeds compete with vegetables and flowers for sunshine, moisture, nitrogen and micro-nutrients. In the early spring when my perennials are just waking up, I am very careful not to yank their little green sprouts, thinking they are weeds. In fact, I often let some of my weeding go until late May or even mid-June when everything is obvious.
Drain spade and burdock roots it dug
Dandelions, weeds that I don’t mind in the lawn, can get a bit rambunctious in the garden beds, and I pull them without compunction. Because they have a deep taproot, they are best pulled when the soil is moist. I use a long narrow shovel, one sold as a “drain spade” to loosen the soil down 12 to 16 inches. This spade is just 6 inches wide but the blade is16 inches long. I push the blade deep into the soil, pull back a little, then push it forward, and then slowly pull out the weed, the slower the better.
Sometimes I see a little dandelion and just grab it and pull – only to have the top break off while the roots remain. Whenever you leave dandelion roots, or even fragments of root, the plant will grow back.
Burdock and thistles also have tap roots, some going down very deep. The older the weed, the deeper the root. I’ve pulled mature burdock plants with roots nearly two feet deep. This is only possible when the soil is moist.
It’s really critical, especially for any weed that produces lots of seeds, that you not let them flower. If you don’t have time to dig them out, at least snip off the flowers. Many weeds have green flowers, and some will produce seeds even after being pulled if they have already formed flowers. I don’t throw noxious weeds, things like goutweed, in the compost pile for fear they will grow and spread – or leave seeds.
My favorite weeding tool is the CobraHead weeder (www.CobraHead.com). This is shaped like a tine on farmer’s cultivator – or a bent steel finger. I like it because it is narrow in profile and curved in a way that allows me to easily get the blade under the roots of a weed. I pull from below with the CobraHead while pulling the tops from above. I drag it through the soil in a bed after weeding and am always surprised by now many fragments of root it brings to the surface. I can use it with one hand or two. I use it for loosening the soil while planting, too. It is neither right- or left-handed, it is lightweight, and the handle is made from re-cycled plastic.
The CobraHead is great for teasing out long roots, too. I once pulled out a root 39 inches long in one piece, just gently loosening with the tool while tugging on the weed. That root was from a Queen of the Prairie (Filipendula rubra), a lovely pink-flowered perennial thug. It’s great for teasing out roots of invasive grasses.
Flame weeder
Another great weeding tool is a favorite of my comic hero, Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes. I refer to my flame thrower. It is technically a flame weeder, but Calvin and I refer to it as a flame thrower. It’s a metal wand on a 10-foot rubber hose attached to a propane tank normally used for gas grills. Light it, and it sends a flame out of the nozzle that will turn any weed crispy in an instant.
I often use my flame weeder on freshly turned soil. I let weed seeds germinate for a week or more, then burn them off before I plant. I try not to disturb the flamed soil when planting, as seeds that have been buried deeply will not germinate, but those on the surface, or near the surface will. Many weeds have what I call a photo-trigger. No light? They won’t germinate. Or I will flame, then plant seeds, then flame again before my carrots are up. Available from Johnny’s Selected Seeds or Fedco Seeds.
Garlic mustard leaves
One of the worst weeds in the world is garlic mustard. Not only will it outcompete other plants in the understory, it can grow in full sun to full shade, and can produce many tens of thousands of seeds per square yard. Garlic mustard is also allelopathic, meaning that it produces chemicals that inhibit the growth of other plants and mycorrhizal fungi needed for healthy tree growth and tree seedling survival.
A friend last year hired a guy to pull all the garlic mustard under her trees and shrubs. It pulls easily, and he quickly filled wheelbarrows full of mature plants. But this year there were thousands of tiny garlic mustard seedlings popping up all over, even in the bark mulch he had put down. I lent him my flame weeder, and in no time he had burned off the small plants.
Many weeds can be deterred by a good thick layer of mulch. Seeds don’t germinate, or seedlings can’t push through the mulch, particularly if you lay down 4-6 sheets newspaper before mulching. Other, aggressive weeds will. Mature Japanese knotweed roots have been said to push through an asphalt driveway! Still, most garden weeds are really just enthusiastic plants that want to be your friends! My practice is to pull weeds every day, and that way I hope to finally beat them. Hah!
Henry is a garden writer, public speaker and garden consultant. He lives in Cornish Flat, NH. You may reach him at henry.homeyer@comcast.net.
Weeds … Alien Invaders or Plants Just Looking for a New Home?
It’s winter, and I have time to get caught up on my reading. When I was in Wales last fall I made a book-lovers pilgrimage to Hay-on-Wye. This is a town of 1,500 to 2,000 souls with at least 28 independent bookstores, mostly stores selling used books. That’s about a bookstore for every 50 people living there! Needless to say, it attracts lots of booklovers, especially in June when it has a book festival.
I spent 2 days poking around bookshops looking for weird and wonderful books and found plenty. Among them was a book on weeds, Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants by Richard Mabey (Profile books, 2010).
The author is a British nature writer with an interest in plants, especially weeds. Weeds, he explains, are opportunists. Cities are full of weeds growing in the most unlikely places: between the cracks of the sidewalks or walls, in abandoned lots – and once a weed seed even germinated in someone’s eye! Wherever they find a niche, they grow. Many can produce large numbers of seeds or are able to spread by roots that wander; most have arrived from distant countries.
We gardeners know, as he points out, that weeds move in when we disturb the soil – to plant a tomato or to create a flower garden. But a weed, according to Mabey, is just a plant growing where we want to grow something else, or nothing at all. I liked his quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered”.
In late fall I got an email from a friend asking me to identify a weed that had been troublesome in his cold frame. “I attach an image, as I do not even know the name of this curse to the garden world, this Medusa which has been defying eradication. Can you put a name to this curse with an idea how to best cope with it?”
I told him that his bane was chickweed (Stellaria media), and that it is edible – some people use it like lettuce or steam it like spinach. Once he knew that, he changed his attitude 180 degrees. Which is lucky, as he did some research and found that chickweed can bloom 5 times per year with each plant producing up to 20,000 seeds that can remain viable in the ground up to 40 years. He emailed that, “I guess I might as well enjoy the fact that it is edible and is most profuse at a time of the year (early December) when there is not much else edible growing vibrantly.”
But back to Richard Mabey’s book on weeds. I learned that Kentucky bluegrass is not originally from Kentucky, but arrived from Europe where it is a not-very-prominent meadow grass. But it found different conditions here in the new world, and thrived.
Speaking of lawns, some gardeners, I think, could enjoy life a lot more if they accepted weeds a little more. I’m pretty lax about weeds in my lawn – I don’t remove them unless, like thistles, they can hurt bare feet. If they’re green and can be mowed, they’re okay by me. I like dandelions, I think they’re cheerful. I don’t understand the desire to poison them or dig them out.
In another bit of trivia, I learned that the common burdock (Arctium lappa) inspired a Swiss inventor, George de Mestral, to create velcro. According to Mabey’s book, Mestral came back from a walk with his dog and studied the burrs attached to its fur – and realized that it could be copied in nylon. He patented Velcro in 1951.
Weeds, Mabey pointed out, are highly adaptable. In a relatively few generations they can modify their color, height, or seed size to fit in with agricultural crops – disguising themselves, as it were, to avoid being eliminated. And some are positively vicious. Field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis), which resembles morning glories, not only monopolizes soil nutrients, it exudes pheromones that inhibit germination of most grain crops. Quack grass (Agopyron repens) produces a toxin that can poison corn.
But many “weeds” invade our spaces and become a part of our acceptable plant palette. The state flower of Vermont is red clover, which is not a native flower, for example. Mabey is all for giving “naturalized” citizenship to those weeds that can be useful to us, like that chickweed mentioned above. There are just a few that he singles out as truly scary.
Goutweed
First on the scary list is kudzu, a Japanese vine that has become a real pest down South. Unless/until global warming gets much worse, we don’t have to worry about it here. But we have Japanese knotweed, also known as bamboo. He says an insect predator is being tested in England as a way to control it, but at present there really is no easy way to get rid of it– even for gardeners who are willing to use chemical poisons on it. And he writes about my nemesis, goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria). Ugh! I thought I had beaten it once by digging it all out and replacing 12 inches of soil, but after a few years it came back.
So enjoy your winter, and try not think about the weeds that are just waiting, like us, for spring. Either that, or get your house ready to go on the market if you have goutweed or Japanese knotweed.
Henry Homeyer is the author of a new children’s book, Wobar and the Quest for the Magic Calumet. His web site is www.henryhomeyer.com.
