I will say this much. When Peak Oil comes and society collapses and we find we must do without coffee and bananas, I will be able to heat our house by burning the thick dried stems of bolted Swiss chard. Trunks four inches across, some of them, and with ugly, hellaciously fibrous taproots looking like beets Satan might force his kids to eat. Every winter the seedlings sprout, descendants of a crop of rainbow-stemmed chard I planted in 2002, and every year we try our best to keep up with it, the rabbit and guinea pig included, and every spring I yank out forests of towering spires of white- and red-stemmed chard. The yellow stem genes seem to have been weeded out, so to speak. If I keep letting some of it go to seed each year, we will have chard forever.
I spent some of today pulling English sorrel out in great clumps. How much sorrel soup can one household eat? I planted a tiny two-inch pot of the stuff when I first built the garden beds, and now I am forever battling it. A particularly tenacious clump of sorrel has sunk roots beneath the flagstone at the entrance to the garden beds, and it resists all my efforts to remove it. Where the chard comes out with a mere tug even though its taproot may run two feet down, sorrel digs in its heels and resists. A couple weeks ago I noticed a row of French sorrel, buckler sorrel, growing beneath the north fence, and when it completes its invasion of our garden we will have no use at all for the English species: the French sorrel makes far better soup.
Along the wall behind the garden beds, a patch of borage that I kill every now and then. The rabbit runs beneath it, and the plants’ hairs scratch at my shins when I chase him. Bees do like the cobalt flowers, so it helps us pollinate a vegetable or two. It has its uses. At the end of the beds toward the house the patch of lemon balm is getting further out of hand. It reseeds so abundantly that I could be forever pulling out its seedlings. I think four years from now we will have a back patio whose pavers are lost in a sea of lemon balm growing up through the cracks.
I have given up trying to control the cutting celery. I just plowed it under. Or more accurately, I buried cutting celery seedlings beneath a foot of new compost and planted tomatoes in it this afternoon. A little cutting celery goes a long way, and one good-sized plant can utterly fulfill a couple’s salad and pasta seasoning and potato salad condimenting needs all by its lonesome, and this morning I had two hundred plants vying for the same ten square feet of tomato habitat. The curly parsley is not quite so aggressive, especially since the gopher has found it. But it is jumping the beds and growing between the patio flagstones, biding its time until the lemon balm catches up with it.
I see the cilantro I planted in October has re-seeded itself as well.
Meanwhile, I have got to do something about the Egyptian onions that are taking over a fifth of the garden. I found them growing in the gravel path, for Christ’s sake. They get so thick in patches that nothing else can grow, not a dandelion or a thistle. I plan to pull out a few square feet to plant epazote, which I should know better than to do. Two years from now I will be feverishly eating quesadillas con epazote, trying to keep up. And it looks like the oregano has, as they say, escaped cultivation, spreading itself throughout the bed opposite the shed.
Pulling English sorrel out of one of the beds, I found Zinfandel shoots coming up where they aren’t supposed to be. I’m going to have to nip that in the bud.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Garden
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