Weeds: The Creepers in the Garden

It is spring and now begins the “War of the Weeds.”

All of our familiar little “friends”, the weeds, are popping up all over. It seems the first green I get to see are the creepers in the garden, those leaves of chickweed starting to creep and crawl all over the garden. It is so early and we are starting those long days of continuous rain, and this little weed is already flowering and hurrying to set seed!

If I don’t get out there and pull it completely, root and all, it will be all over the place. Chickweed can completely overwhelm a garden, blanketing it in a curtain of green. Hurry!

This little round bittercress is a rampant spreader and will take over. It is already budding and getting ready to send up tall shoots with a flower. That flower quickly dries, and all you have to do is brush against the plant, and it shoots the dried seeds! You can hear the little pellets hit all around! Even touching it to pull it after it has gone to seed will “pull the trigger.” Get them before they seed!

I am already finding the nutsedge in my garden. There is a yellow and a  purple nutsedge based some on the color of its tufted seed head. Pull this up before it seeds.

Of course, the dreaded dandelion. It always grows at the base of another plant so that I have to practically destroy that one to get it out. And the roots? Get real, they reach to Middle Earth so forget digging that out! But don’t let them grow up and puff out those seeds from that little white top.  Trouble!  But sometimes I win when it has rained a lot! Mwah-ha-ha!

Now those dandelions are great flowers for the survival of the bees, so if you can do it, leave them to bloom to that the bees get their needs met by enjoying that golden pollen. But be sure to deadhead and get rid of the spent flower before it can seed.  See more posts from my Backyard Flower Garden.

I think this is ground ivy ( or henbit ), these are so hard to tell the difference.  The ground ivy leaves have petioles, so that is why I am going with that ID. Too bad ground ivy is the worst one to have! It has gotten into the hypertufa trough with my Sedum rupestre “Angelina”. These troughs need to be weeded with small needle-nose pliers,  or tweezers, or miniature three-pronged cultivators.  Or a tiny fork will do just as well.

How do you weed your hypertufa troughs?  Those creepers in the garden get into your hypertufa troughs too!

And how do you feel about those “lovely maple seeds?”……….I have several maple trees in the yard which produce approximately 100k seeds each ( I am exaggerating…..aren’t I ?….)  

So let’s get out and clean out the beds as much as you can each day. We can’t let the weeds get ahead of us. Because we know that they grow and multiply better than anything else in the garden, right?

Have a great spring day!