Selective Weeding
If your garden receives volunteers on the afternoon breeze, don't yank them yet. Watch to see was Nature gives and welcome it to your garden's diversity.
Asters keeping the garden colorful in late summer and autumn.
I always struggled with the idea of landscaping because Jeff and I usually lived in the urban-wild land interface. The amount of "weeds" that blow in to our garden on the afternoon zephyr becomes daunting.
Each spring, our yards wantonly sprouted fresh, tiny flowers that I would miss if I didn’t look down. One day walking around our home in Truckee, I took off the blue-blockers and reeled back in surprise. Blue forget-me-nots lay around the Manzanita and mule ear daisies.
It's much the same in the desert. It may look like an endless sea of dull green scrub, but in the shade of all that sage are paintbrush, buckwheat, lupines, and all kinds of tiny gifts. Sometimes the flowers squeeze up through what appear to be a mosaic of stones exhibiting a rainbow of earthy hues.
Buckwheat spreading across the Pine Nut Mountains
As more houses filled in the empty lots in Truckee and their residents landscaped with patches of manicured lawns and domestic flowers, my inner conflict grew more intense. The local garden club obtained powerful influence in guiding newcomers to the mountains in replacing the natural growth into stunning replacements for the suburban gardens they left behind. I couldn't help thinking "why did they move here?"
This fostered a weeding dilemma for me. When we relocated, the lot had been scraped clean of topsoil. I allowed anything green, especially rabbit brush and muleys to flourish. To give the decomposing granite a nudge toward soilhood, we blanketed the yard with a thick layer of composted horse manure from the nearby equestrian center. The winter snows soaked it into the ground.
It worked! All too well, in fact. By mid-summer, our amber waves of grass hay stood thick and nearly a meter high. My father-in-law pointed out the obvious: it could be a fire hazard. In autumn, I pulled it all up, discovering how the roots had churned the granite into billowing loam.
Catmint, perennial, drought-resistant, deer-proof.
Under the shade of this wild lawnscape grew the beginnings of flowering treasures. I was thrilled as we added catmint to the area where Manzanita and mule ear daisies thrived. Also, our swaths of daffodils still bloom every spring as the snow melts back, denying with toxic flavor any deer that wants a nibble.
A neighbor, whose wildflower garden looked as if planted deliberately by her hand, tipped me off to "selective weeding." As we talked, she pulled out whatever gangly plants she didn't want. Following her lead over the ensuing years, I encouraged wild yarrow, dandelions, and a gigantic rabbit brush. It was my pride and joy, even attracting another neighbor to ask where I had purchased such a beautiful plant.
Rabbit brush
"It's just a wild thing that volunteered in this spot and I water it occasionally." She was amazed. I didn't tell her I watered everything in my yard nearly every day. If it was green, it got doused.
The local fire prevention crew was not impressed. An earnest young man with a weed-whacker obliterated my beautiful rabbit brush. He reeled back in horror as I raged at him for destroying my "baby."
"But ma'am, it's right under this power pole. It's a fire hazard." He slunk away to ravage other innocent flowers. Thus, I learned that when living in wildfire country, one must be prudent about one's landscaping.
A hardy crop of mustard, an edible gift compliments of the afternoon wind.
After moving to Minden, NV, different plants challenged my selective weeding. One year, Carson Valley bloomed with a carpet of gorgeous yellow plants. As soon as July arrived, however, all of this bounty dried to an ugly tinder a foot or two high. What's more, it was inedible. Nothing ate it. I would even wager that goats would shy away from it. Â Flixweed was its name. I hated seeing it invade my acre mostly because it mimicked mustard, its edible look-alike that has a lovely and tasty rosette of saw-toothed greens at its base.
Mullein, good for lung infections and bronchitis.
One of my more impetuous moves was bringing a pair of mullein plants from Truckee to Rancho Pequeño in Minden. I planted them and watched them grow to towering beauty. Now, mullein grow all over the place. Some I allow to grow, others I wrench from the earth. Their leaves are wonderful for clearing my lungs of bronchitis each year, but one or two plants will fill the prescription, thank you.
New landscape to replace lawn and connect that trellis to other gardens.
Then we hired a landscaper to replace our lawn with a fenced paradise, a bean-shaped flower garden, and an iris bed to connect a trellis that stood in the middle of nowhere with another established garden. It all looked beautiful for a short time. Then the volunteers arrived. Among them was mallow.
Lovely, edible mallow
I had seen people in Israel harvesting this veggie from vacant lots near the kibbutz where I stayed for a few months. Remembering how intrigued I was about this, I researched and picked some to try in a rice dish. All that summer, I took advantage of this manna from heaven, even drying some to freeze for winter use. Our landscaper was not impressed.
"That mallow's going to suck up all your water! Get it out of here."
Far be it from me to follow orders, but after a few years, I did yank out most of it. Like the Mexican primrose we inserted into the bean garden that also sent the landscaper into hysteria, mallow spreads like a virus. Luckily, it and the primrose have life spans.
An echinacea volunteer in the potato patch.
One beautiful surprise was watching a lovely-leafed volunteer growing at the edge of Jeff's potato patch. We hoped a flower would match the attractive leaves and were rewarded with Echinacea. I vowed to let it grow, resisting my itch to carefully pry it from its chosen place and propagate it in the bean-shaped garden. It came back again this year, but I did harvest its seeds from the first plant. I'd better get those in the ground, though, before they get too old.
Honey bees final supper before winter: asters and rabbit brush
Another invader was asters. Its leaves climb up a tall stalk with reasonably attractive foliage, so I didn't yank it up. I was curious about the blossom it would reveal. This has been the protocol with many a mystery plant. Some I've kept to produce another year. Others, like the brazen and thorny thistle, get chopped down as soon as we find them. One such triffid we neglected in a back corner reached a height of two meters and matched that size in circumference. Jeff thought about putting on his bee suit before taking the axe to the beast. I then realized why ancient villages grew these as a defense against marauding tribes. Even tanks couldn't scale a hedge of these things.
Wild asters pouring over the walled garden
Meanwhile, the many asters I allowed to grow exploded in pretty little daisies with purple radials and brilliant yellow centers. Mixing among the rabbit brush, these two desert partners provide two months worth of rich nectar and pollen for bees' final supper before winter hibernation. Some grew to two-meter bushes covered with flowers. Those taking root in our walled garden poured over the edge in gorgeous displays as if I had deliberately planted them there.
Which brings me to our current experiment: rewilding lawn into a meadow with bags of wildflower seeds. The caveat is that it takes at least three years to bring such a garden into full flower … full spectacular, reseeding, splendiferous flower. Am I being to expectant here? Another caveat is that the lawn must be removed and soil enriched to give the new seeds a chance to succeed. Well, as I said about my resistance to following directions, we (Jeff) didn't want to dig up the eight-to-twelve-inch thick root systems. Can't blame him at all.
Evening primrose just keeps blooming.
Let it be said that we got some surprising, though meager, results. After sowing seeds in the bare spots in the grass and repairing sprinklers (a constant chore), the first year brought very little except a beautiful evening primrose. This year, the second, some other daisy-like beauty has grown in that particular space, but another primrose is growing just a couple of meters away. Other aspirational plants have also sprouted and bloomed. As long as I don't chop them down while weed-whacking around the sprinkler heads, they will survive.
Next year, the third, we will get more flowers, especially if we continue to replenish the carpet of seeds. Birds and squirrels have ravaged hundreds of bulbs Jeff planted as well as some of the seeds. Great Basin Seed Company coats their seeds to camouflage them from predation. We're going to try seeds from our local Comstock Seeds to see what they include in their mix.
We still have hope. Really, what else can we have at this point. Farming and gardening is always a crapshoot, especially in harsh environments like Nevada. In places like California, a person can jam a stick into the ground and a tree will grow. It's a certainty. The Great Basin, however, challenges everyone who tries any sort of agriculture. Some make it go. Some don't.
So, my parting words are: accept whatever blows over the mountains on the afternoon breeze. It's a gift, and it's rude to be choosy. If it's green and has a pretty blossom, rejoice!
A mixture of landscaper’s plants, homeowner’s additions, and volunteers.
All photos taken by Sue Cauhape
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Inspiring, Sue. Such a lovely philosophy of gardening. I have two friends on the same wavelength as you and I will send this to them for inspiration. They will love it. I have a sweet little contained garden, myself, but everything is in neat, tamed, orderly pots. No weeds, nothing wild. More's the pity.
My wife have similar experiments in gardening. She tried a lot of companion planting this year. Some of it worked, some didn't. The one thing she did regret was planting Mullein last year. We found that it somehow invites squash bugs to the garden and we've been battling those little bastages ever since with diatomaceous earth. As much as I love Zucchini and other squashes, we'll have to stop growing those for a couple years just to discourage the pests from sticking around. My wife finds that gardening is a constant experiment, especially when having to adjust for warmer temps and fewer pollinators.