Late Summer Weeding

August 11, 2024

Come late August, weeding is one of my least favorite tasks. It is hot and sweaty work and even in drought, the weeds grow with gusto and flourish in every flower bed, vegetable garden and even my driveway. I try not to use chemicals, but sometimes resort to pouring boiling water on the worst weeds to knock them back. I can hoe between the veggies, carefully avoiding the prolific green tomatoes and flowering cucumber vines that seem to have taken over everything, but it is tricky not to do more damage than good. In my flower beds, I want to avoid uprooting blooming black-eyed Susan’s, purple cone flower and assorted lilies. So, I try to pull what I can gently by hand.

It is easy for me to procrastinate about this ongoing chore, but today I decided to take advantage of a rare cooler morning with low humidity. First, I worked on the mimosa seedlings in the bed beside our patio. That area has much more sun than it once did due to an enormous branch that broke from our maple tree in June. Apparently, the little mimosa seeds decided they would take advantage of the great morning light and late afternoon shade. I had some full-on trees with woody stems to dig out, but most were easily pulled by hand.  The vegetable and herb garden are a chaotic mess of over overgrowth, but still productive, so I approached that bed like a surgeon, delicately lifting vines and looking underneath the tomato cages for mimosa seedlings and weeds that were crowding out the vegetables and herbs I planted in April. Most of those weeds came out easily, but I will work on them gently with hand tools later in the week. The beds in front of our bushes and at the end of our sidewalk have been regularly mulched, so the weeds there were not as bad. They bother me the most, however, because I see them every day when I get home from work. I tend to work on those beds a bit each day when I come home from my afternoon walk. Next, I approached the hardest bed of all. The large flower bed Nick put in near the street when he dug our driveway. That bed is easily overrun by Bermuda grass, nut grass, and once was so choked with weeds that we had to dig the whole bed out and start over again. Alex lived with us then, and he used his 25-year-old strength to make a full day project into a quick job of couple of hours. Sadly, Alex will never be able to help us again, so I guess I will need to do a better job of keeping on top of the weeds in that bed.

Weeding, and for that matter, spending any amount of time focused on my yard can become a meditative process. Before I know it, the worries I have about work, finances, family things slip away from my mind. Memories of happy times spent with Alex and Andrew playing in the sprinkler, friends sharing meals on the patio, intense badminton games with Nick, Andrew and Alex, and plans for gardens Nick and I would like to put in when we retire dance through my mind. I have lived in this house for almost 28 years.  Many family members have come and gone with the passage of time. Friends who were once daily parts of my life have sometimes drifted away or needed to be weeded like those invasive mimosa seedlings. Others have shown up time and time again, staying by me in all seasons, just like the gardens around our yard. This week, I will take that analogy with me as I return to work. I will continue to cultivate relationships with family and friends who sustain me and help ground me in my grief. I will also remember that my garden is one of those steady friends as it greets me morning and night and I need to take time to nurture it as I do those relationships I would like to have grow and develop in positive ways.