recently spent an
afternoon doing some
garden maintenance.
The summer blooms were spent and needed cutting back, part of the yard had gone patchy and bald and I hoped to seed it before the weather turned cool, and I had some bulbs to plant and mulch. But before I could plant my future tulip bed, I had to take care of the weeds.
These insidious invaders had long gone unchecked. At first, they hadn't seemed like a problem – a few scattered sprouts here and there that I managed to ignore. Then they bloomed, and really, they didn't look that bad, filling out the bare spots around my more actively curated beds. They grew rapidly, gangly and tall, depriving the plants I was trying to cultivate from water and light. Their stems had grown thick and thorny, and their roots had gone so deep I could no longer extract them without real effort.
So on one of those rare, absolutely perfect late-September Chicago weekends, I cut, seeded and finally dug up piles of undesirable vegetation. Working up a sweat felt rewarding after several weeks of the sickening roller coaster ride we call 2020.
I
Photo Credit John Bussell