This morning, while working on my daily five-minutes-of-weeding*, I thought about the summer between undergraduate and graduate school, when I worked as a landscaper in Seattle, under one of the women who was part of our rowing program. Robyn ran a pretty amazing landscaping company that specialized in turning boring yards into beautiful gardens full of native plants. I learned a lot about planning out a garden from Robyn, and about how to properly install pavers from the two Mexican guys who worked on our crew (and about how spoiled Seattleites were with respect to hot weather; they'd be amused to see me garden now).
On top of the projects that we did that involved starting new gardens from scratch, we also did periodic maintenance for gardens that Robyn had constructed previously. The great part of the maintenance projects was that I had a chance to see what many of the gardens we started would grow into - how the plants would eventually fill space and complement each other.
There has been one major difference** between those gardens, and how I must garden now, in Arizona: money. The people who hired Robyn and the gang generally had enough funds to set us loose to do things the proper way. Our crew was big enough, and armed with enough of the right tools, to be able to tackle a whole yard in just a few days. Robyn's approach to yards choked full of weeds was generally to remove, en masse, the existing weed- and weed-seed-filled soil and replace it with fresh, fluffy, nutrient-rich, sterile mulch. You should have seen the truckloads of mulch we shoveled, the bags of manure we hefted. The old soil could either end up as fill dirt, or some fraction could get composted and recycled, depending on the nature of the project.
Those sorts of enterprises are possible if one has the money (and inclination) required to rent the equipment needed to haul everything away to the appropriate disposal facility, plus the money to pick up massive quantities of replacement manure and mulch. I have neither resource at my disposal, so I must garden in a different fashion.
The weeds I removed this morning mostly come from the weedy ancestral plants that grew in the backyard before I started to garden. They have also come from the manure we added to the yard, which appears to be rich in seeds from the types of plants that horses enjoy, including ever-pesky and persistent bermudagrass. The weeds sprouted up at the same time as the seeds that
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scrottie sowed last October, so the plants we would like to cultivate are getting choked out. I like to think of my daily weeding time as Plant Liberation time, freeing the vegetables from the ravages of the bermudagrass and its ilk. Today, I mostly liberated tiny Swiss Chards, and some sweet potato brambles that will hopefully green up again and produce some fat tubers.
I keep thinking back to a particular customer from that summer of landscaping. She was resistant to Robyn's urgings to scrape out her weedy soil and replace it with a weed-free solution. Part of the woman's argument came from her belief that the existing soil on her property was already incredibly rich, for it was a fine silty soil. She was probably right, and I can appreciate her sentiment from some standpoints. But I suspect this woman wanted the best of all possible worlds, for she also watched our actions too closely while we worked, and didn't want us to spend too much time weeding. Perhaps she now weeds her own gardens, although I doubt it, given their expansiveness. More than anything, she suffered from I think of as the Scottsdale problem, where her yard was too big to be usefully maintained in a meaningful fashion. So who knows how it looks now.
*Okay, so maybe the five minutes lasted closer to an hour this morning. Once I get started, it's so hard to stop!
**Okay, two differences. Those were ornamental gardens, and I am trying to grow food.
