The Never Ending Story ( or Dandelion Wars)

For the last few mornings I was just warming up to the dandelion battle and walked around the yard picking the cheery little yellow flowers that dared to sprout. Not much of an offensive, I admit, but I thought at least those little yellow heads wouldn't be turning to seeds and floating around creating more. 

This morning I waged a full scale dandelion offensive! We had a bit of rain last night and after some moisture is always a good time to dig out dandelions.  I don't like to use chemicals on our lawn here for a number of reasons... because of the 3 acres of environmental preserve around our acreage, out of courtesy and for safety to the birds and bees, and also the danger of it leeching into the pond (and I have enough pond problems already; see Pond post).




I have a handy Fiskar weed digger which works pretty well if you have good aim and can line it up exactly with the centre of the offending dandelion. Otherwise it takes several tries and you end up with 3 or 4 holes on the lawn and the dandelion is still mostly intact.  So I find the best way is the old fashioned offensive, a sharp narrow garden trowel and a steady hand and some muscle. 


This works well and I was feeling pretty successful, filling my large gardening basket (an old laundry basket) almost full with the little pests, until I looked up and realized the extent of the job ahead! How many hours was going to devote to this? Okay time to scale back a little.... I concentrated on digging out the largest ones and plucking the yellow heads off the tinier ones to speed up the process. Of course that leaves the inobtrusive ones there to fight again another day, I know... 


Isn't there a bird out there I could entice to our yard to come and eat the dandelions or something?  I did read some place that the pretty little gold finches like to eat dandelion seeds, but I really would prefer that the little yellow heads don't get to that stage, or realistically, not too many of them anyway. 


There must be some natural product that can safely be sprayed ( or dumped) on the little green lacy leaved clusters... maybe something as innocuous as vinegar....
 (Vinegar seems to be good for so many things besides salad dressing: cleaning the water scale off my fish aquariums, cleaning windows, killing slugs in the garden, eliminating ants, body odor in your armpits .... Seriously! I read that on the internet!) 


I know vinegar is supposed to be good for killing the grass in between flagstones and cement sidewalks, but in this case I want to preserve the grass and just magically vanquish the dandelions, if possible. 


On the other had, as I look out over the stretch of lawn it seems that the majority of the green color comes from the dandelion plants since the lawn itself seems pretty sparse. Is the lawn so sparse because the dandelions are taking over or are the dandelions being allowed to encroach because the lawn is so sparse?  The old "catch 22", cause and effect ...


As my mind is perusing all the permutations of that question, I started to notice a stinging in the palm of my hand. 
"Drat! Those pesky mosquitos have infiltrated my gloves!" I thought.  (I fought and valiantly lost the mosquito battle yesterday... another story.  Thank goodness for the salvation of 'SSSting Stop'!)


I took off my right glove only to see that I had a blister on the palm of my hand, a popped blister at that! I guess in the heat and sweat of the battle I didn't notice how my hands were sweating. I was wearing a pair of those gardening gloves that have fabric on the tops and a rubbery material on the palms and undersides of the fingers. I guess my leather gloves would have been a better choice under the circumstances...


So the dandelions drew blood so to speak. I guess they won a huge point today, especially as I looked over at the edge of the driveway at all the mocking little yellow heads still grinning at me, which were all going to be safe from me that day. I looked down into my laundry basket at all their fallen comrades and felt I had made a certain amount of  progress in the ongoing battle, so I raised my trowel in victory! 


"I'll be back!" I shouted viciously, as I picked up the basket and triumphantly made off with their brothers!

The Persistence of grass

Tulips April 26th

Delphiniums are doing well...

Maltese cross and columbines have sprouted

Monkshood has sprouted

Rhubarb is up first!

Once the rainstorms abated this week, and the sun shone bravely, albeit weakly again, it was wonderful how fresh and green everything looked! My new tulips (planted last fall) finally trusted the weather enough to pop open! They are a deep red color with black centres. The rest are not that far behind.

I can't recall if I planted all the same type of tulips or not. I need to dig out my gardening journal and see what I wrote last fall. I used to believe that I would remember all theses types of things about my gardening from one season to the next, but I learned the hard way that it is a loooong stretch of time from October when the snow flies, and April when it melts again.

The tulips were beat hands down by the dandelions, though. Three tulips blooming ( so far) versus 8 dandelions. Because of all the birds and wildlife around our acreage I don't use chemicals on my lawn or garden. When the dandelions start to bother me, I go after them with a narrow trowel and dig them out by hand. Back breaking work, yes, and I admit, in all my years of gardening I have never won the dandelion wars; maybe the occasional battle, but in the end, the dandelions always prevail! I haven't got enough time or energy to eradicate them all, but I console myself with the thought that there are some birds and/ or insects out there that benefit from dandelions (aren't there????)

My other very stubborn and even more persistent nemesis is grass roots. You have to grudgingly admire its ability to grow against all odds in every crevice and corner, no matter how hard a person tries to prevent it; Like a bad virus that seems to mutate and get stronger and more invasive the harder you work against it! I have been stubbornly digging out grass shoots sprouting in my now freshly rained-upon flower beds all week with a big shovel, small trowel, whatever works. I'm floored by how long some of the grass roots are once you start pulling one end out. At the very least, it's a job that has much more success if its done after a rain when the soil is soft. But grass is so resilient that if you even miss one tiny little root it morphs overnight into a veritable lawn in the flower bed, or so it seems.

I use a handy laundry basket out in the garden to fill up with grass and weeds as I work away. I like the handles on it to cart it around and the holes in the sides to easily dump out any accumulated water when it gets left out in the rain in between weedings (which I admit it often seems to do).

I have completed the weeding of one of my large beds, my two tiered rock garden bed and part of the long narrow perennial bed in the middle of the yard. You would think that I was getting ahead in the grass weeding game, wouldn't you, but alas! It seems that each morning Mother Nature has sprouted even more grass in areas that I thought I had already finished weeding. Eventually though, the perennials get tall enough that the grass blends in better and I come away with the illusion that I am done weeding! :)