The evil weed covers tart fruit

So I’m hacking away at the Evil Weed up on the hill and I’m thinking, Hey, this is where I found those apple blossoms last May. Are they apples yet? So I pulled more swallowort off the tree and find one, three, four…

Time to weed the ragweed

Don’t let this happen to you! A few plants with attractive foliage, a bit like tansy or chrysanthemum, in a little-visited corner turned into a Giant Pile of Ragweed. I should have known better.

Upsy daisy

Just the other day, I was wondering who the next volunteer would be. And yesterday, as if having a bright sunny day for a change wasn’t enough, a bright little Ox-eye Daisy popped up.  Nice! Last year I had to go to Readercon to see a daisy.
The real question is, Will the bees like it?

Stalking the Wild Asparagus

If you’re interested in foraging wild foods, there are good resources on the web, but a library copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons has its own charm.   The title essay tells how as a youth he went looking for something, anything for his family to eat and found armloads of wild asparagus. [...]

Behold the army

Oh, hell.
All my earlier optimism about defeating the Black Swallow-wort this year evaporated when I saw this. This is the side of the hill where I haven’t done much digging and uprooting last year or the years before. Sure, the parts where I have been on the offensive are looking pretty good, but it’s so [...]

Feed your bees

A very nice article I read today confirms something I observed last year: native pollinators prefer native flowers. Since there’s so many different kinds, from  bees to syrphid flies, you need many different flowers over the course of the seasons to feed them. You can find lists of suggested plants, but the easy way is [...]

Black swallow-wort

Behold the enemy.
These are the weeds I should be digging. Just as the maple sprouts start to get scarce, the Black Swallow-wort pokes its evil head above the ground. That bit of hot weather over the weekend seems to have flushed them out, too. Thank goodness it’s cool and springlike again. Makes spending an afternoon [...]

Maple Sprouts

These are the weeds I should be pulling: sneaky little maple sprouts, lying coiled on the surface, eager for spring rains to wake them, ready to spread green little wings.  They’re easy to pull now, but not when they take root and become seedlings and saplings and trees. That’s the price of having a corner [...]

Hawkweed

Lately these leggy yellow flowers are all over the coneflowers. They look a bit like dandelion flowers, but the dandelion flowered in spring; it’s high summer now, totally the wrong season. Plus there are candelabra of flowers on each plant, and it’s a lot taller. Hawkweed.
So, any guesses why I’m interested in it?

Weedercon

I love Readercon, but it’s still too many people, too many ideas, too much information in too little space. No wonder it doesn’t take long for me to go into buffer overflow. What? A writer who needs a little alone time? Never heard of such a thing. This year it was even hotter than usual [...]