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I’ve been staring outside and wondering if the garden will ever reappear. I consult photos to convince myself that it was here last year. I didn’t just make it up.
My rational self knows this anxiety is a recurring symptom of spring fever. The hosta are always slow to poke up from the black depths.
As warm days arrive in groups of two, then three consecutively, my faith is ever-so-slowly restored.
The nagging worry this spring is that the chickens have scratched and pecked my garden to death. Why did I keep them letting them fly the coop?
Surely their busy feet destroyed whatever was left that they hadn’t eaten. Why had it taken me forever to realize their incessant pecking wasn’t in pursuit of worms but seeds?
On the bright side, most of the seeds they foraged would have otherwise sprouted dandelions, purslane, spotted spurge, garlic mustard, and other noxious weeds.
Plus, the chickens have done a superb job of depopulating the dead nettle. Once a prized groundcover, this plant is as determined as they are. Pulling it out by hand has failed to save several shrub roses from strangulation, and the creeping junipers that once descended in charming rivulets down a sunny slope to the sidewalk are now juniper skeletons dripping with dead nettle.
Reading up on a member of the clan called henbit that is hardy in the U.K. and beloved by British chickens, I wondered if my dead nettle (a.k.a., lamium) might have the same intoxicating effect. Lamium belongs to the mint family.
I set up a portable pen where the roses and junipers once flourished and placed the chickens inside.
To my delight, they went after the dead nettle with zest — until they realized they were not free-ranging and busted out of their makeshift prison.
Tossing lamium into their coop with my pitchfork isn’t nearly as efficient, even though the girls devour the weed faster than I can dig it up.
There are far better ways to dispose of weeds than chickens. For instance, you can eat them. The weeds, I mean.
With more and more gardeners planting Victory Gardens — seed merchants nationwide report record sales — it must be mentioned that many weeds are edible.
You can improve their flavor just as you do that of conventional greens, by sauteing them in oil and garlic, for example, or adding these same ingredients to a salad of, say, dandelion leaves. Dandelions and garlic mustard are especially nutritious.
A weeding tool that I swear by is called the hula hoe on account of its swiveling head. Spring is the perfect time to run the hoe’s sharp, square-shaped blade over your beds. It is most effective at ripping out weeds with shallow roots.
You can always give your weeds some competition. Plant groundcovers that spread aggressively, such as alyssum, California poppies, sedum, forget-me-nots, yarrow, geraniums, gazania and even wild strawberries.
Then cover weedy patches with a woody mulch that’s at least 4 inches deep, to protect the soil from incoming weed seeds.
Mulching with shredded or whole leaves, straw or even cardboard actually feeds the soil as it puts the brakes on weeds … if not their seeds.
I don’t use herbicides, but I have no problem fighting fire with fire, as in a Butane torch.
Both boiling water and vinegar also kill weeds and, again, if you get ‘em when they’re young and keep at it over the summer you, too, can have a weed-free brick patio.
Just remember, hot water and vinegar can’t tell a dandelion from a Japanese peony.
But then, neither can RoundUp.
No garden will ever be entirely weed-free. But weeds can be managed. Always remove their flowers, no matter how pretty, before they have a chance to multiply by a factor of . . . you don’t want to know.
Weeds are by definition undesirables. It’s the plants we DO want that are bred to be sterile — too much of a good thing and all that.
Which is precisely the point. Gardening is a business, remember.
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