Conscious Choice: The Secret Diary of an Organic Weeder

July 2006 | BackWords

The Secret Diary of an Organic Weeder

By Bob McCray

My battle with weeds has nothing to do with keeping up with the Joneses, even though our town is known for its prim-and-trim, weed-free lawns.

My battle dates from childhood, when I was taught that weeds were evildoers. Dandelions were the Huns and the Visigoths. Creeping Charlie vines were the Magyars sweeping in across the steppes. Crabgrass was the horned invader from the dark galaxy.

When I was little, we pulled weeds by hand, one by one, on our knees — going after the roots with our tiny fingers. After a Saturday of weed pulling, I got ice cream.

By high school, that all changed. Scientific advances had introduced herbicides. Those were my chemical years. I puffed pesticides on our vegetable garden with a hand sprayer. I was Sylvester Stallone using my tank-pump sprayer as an assault weapon against marauding weeds. One time I killed an entire lawn spraying crabgrass killer. I can still smell the fumes.

During college and later years, my attention was elsewhere, but my weed hostility still lurked like a bad seed buried deep in my mind. And after marriage, children, and moving to the suburbs, it returned.

Only by then, things had changed again. The organic movement had arrived. Herbicides and pesticides were passé. And, as an entry-level organic gardener, I was back to the weed-pulling days of my childhood — “hands and knees, no dandelions please.”

Also by then, I was taller. It was farther to the ground. Bending over to pull weeds killed my back.

Furthermore, the weeds seemed hardier. To pry out the giant carrot-size roots of a “big boy” dandelion or yank out the sprawling octopus-tentacles of Creeping Charlie took forever. Violets were the most devious. They grew in delicate “bouquets,” but you ripped out your fingernails trying to pry out the roots.

With creeping back pain, I decided weed pulling had no redeeming value. So, we just did away with part of our lawn. We planted trees (from catalogs), nurtured yew bushes from bird droppings, and propagated the ground cover that grew over from our neighbor’s yard. We created a “woodland effect” and cut our grass area in half.

That helped, but it was still too much work. Summers, I had to weed a patch of grass every night to keep up. And while I toiled in the soil, our neighbors played with their kids in their yards or barbequed and sipped an aperitif.

There weren’t many role models left in town who still pulled weeds. Lawn services were out in force. One time when I was weeding, a young woman walking by asked me what I was doing. When I replied, “Pulling weeds,” she said, “But what are you doing?”

For years I fought the good fight, but finally, the kink in my back and my aching knees won out.

Then, one day I had a breakthrough. I was walking down our alley, and saw an elderly neighbor weeding his vegetable garden. He was sitting in a lawn chair. He’d reach down and weed around his tomatoes, hop his chair down the row, and then weed around his beans.

That evening, I hauled my lawn chair onto our parkway. As cars whizzed by, I attacked the evildoers sitting down, hopping my chair across the grass to the salsa music on my headphones. It worked great!

Unfortunately, that was the year that West Nile Virus struck, and our street was in a corridor with the highest number of West Nile cases in the U.S.

At first I stuck to my guns — pulling weeds at dusk, after work — but not without mosquito body armor. I sat in my lawn chair wearing a heavy hooded sweatshirt, flannel-lined overhauls, knee-high wool socks pulled up over my cuffs, and gardening gloves. Traffic slowed. Passengers stared. It was 90 degrees.

That lasted a week.

The following spring, I broke down and put on chemical weed killer, mustering all the guilt an organic gardener should feel. Unfortunately, that August, the weeds returned bigger than ever. Again, fate stepped in. By mistake, I left my dandelion “fork” in a yard-waste bag, and my wife tossed it out. When I tried to buy a new one, all I could find was a dandelion fork on the end of a long pole.

But amazingly, with the extra leverage, I could spear the stoniest ground like butter. And with practice, I could flick out the biggest bully of a dandelion with ease. “In the zone,” I was a one-man SWAT team and could take out a parkway of dandelions in five minutes.

Then came the piece de resistance. We had a drought, and after reading some lawn articles, I set the lawnmower to cut our grass high. One day, I was edging the garden with my old rotary-blade edge trimmer. We were having a party and I thought to make the lawn nice I’d just lop off the tops of the weeds with the edge trimmer. So, I gave all the weeds a haircut — the violets, Creeping Charlie, and even some clover. In five minutes, the grass looked a little wavy, but it was weed-free and beautiful.

Of course, the weeds grew back. But the next time I cut the grass, I trimmed off the weed tops, again leaving the roots. You know what? After a few times, the violets went on vacation. Even the Creeping Charlie petered out, except after a rain. And, the dandelions were no match for my forked petard.

Nowadays, I have a decent relationship with our non-grass plants, and I look on the job as a “Weed Management Technician.” My job description is “live and let live.” Weeds are part of our natural heritage. As Thoreau said in Walden, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

When he isn’t teaching, or writing, Bob McCray and his wife, who live in Evanston, enjoy random acts of gardening and occasional dances with weeds.

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