noedit / 7.29.23 / weeds

The weeds in the garden are growing like germs but at least they’re green, my wife agrees. Still I’m considering nuking them with weapons-grade vinegar bought from Home Depot. You just mix in some soap and salt. The reason for the soap is to break down the surfactants on the plants’ surface. That way the poison really gets in there. The reason for the salt is unknown. It just seems like a good idea to salt the bastards too if you’re going to go to the trouble of spraying them with anything at all.

These weeds.

I’m telling you these weeds.

When we moved into our house the previous owner had covered the dirt area out front that was once a lawn with mulch, hiding the secret garden of invasive species that lurked below. In further support of this terrible judgement they chose to cover the ground with red-dyed mulch, which is the landscaping equivalent of a lower back tattoo. They also put a long stick in the ground that I think was at one point a tree. So that’s how it began. Several years later we have won back some territory along the southeastern front with heavy landscaping fabric and heavy stones and some drought-resistant plants. Here the pampas grow twice the height of a tall man, and they are my pride and joy. The remainder of the battlefield is being won back by the weeds, however, as though they wish to crush my hubris.

I ordered some mites from the state for the bindweed proliferating in the no-man’s between our house the neighbor’s. I read that these mites will cripple the otherwise psychotically aggressive vines, but not kill them. I would be satisfied with an armistice but the rain has emboldened the bindweed and just before sitting down to write out these frustrations I saw the bindweed storming the short brick wall into my small patch of pampas and other drought-resistant plants previously mentioned.

In a stroke of green thumbery I bought 32 creeping thyme. Pink chintz, naturally, as these flower with what appear to be blue flowers, but I’m colorblind, so they could very well be pink. After about two months of scorching heat with intermittent rain and vain attempts to refresh these poor specimens on days above 90 with a hose, I count 29 survivors. I am personally offended by the weeds that come near my pink chintz stealing them of their nutrients, and often curse under my breath as I put these little invaders from the earth, tossing them into the window wells because this is convenient, and because I am curious to see if another jumanji situation may arise from those apparently invincible weeds if they are put at the bottom of a nutrientless gravel pit with minimal sunlight. I half expect weeds to grow out of the walls in our basement and throttle me for my laziness while I sit there watching television.

As reinforcement to these thyme plugs I bought about ten thousand additional creeping thyme seeds from an online retailer called sunshine seeds or something like that. I planted them and read the instructions carefully especially the part about keeping them moist and, when watering them, to use no more than a mist setting on the hose. I followed these instructions very, very carefully, exactly once. An hour later the sky opened in a biblical shower that ran a river across my sowed section. I imagine 90% of the seeds washed away. I am curious to see if the neighbor ten houses down starts growing thyme along the gutter there, because there were enough seeds for a field of them. As it stands by some miracle or sheer statistical odds and overplanting some of the thyme is in fact growing around the flagstones with the 29 plants mentioned above. Except. Except! It does not look the same. The 29 plants that are most definitely pink (blue?) chintz have very small delicate leaves like something from a fairy garden while these new sprouts have larger leaves and already betray a legginess unbecoming of a true ground cover. Yet I know they are in fact the thyme seeds that survived the flood because I pinched them up and rubbed them between my fingers and it smelled quite lovely like thyme. And I asked my wife to smell my finger and she did without question, which I think could serve as evidence in a court of law of the trust between us. So she smelled my finger and said yes, hmmm, I do think that is thyme.

So we may have all the thyme in the world soon. But for now the weeds campaign against me and I feel like a Frenchman in another losing war without any time at all to go out there and spray the Germans down once and for all with vinegar and soap and salt and hell even some chipotle sauce because I’m going to eat my enemies alive if I can just drum up the motivation to take them on.