Beech Tree News Network

Many times, I have amended the statement, “If there is ever a nuclear holocaust, the only things that will survive are cockroaches and Keith Richards,” with other things impossible to kill.  I’m adding bind weed, or Morning Glory as we call it around here, to the amendments.  

Yes, I realize Morning Glory has a thin little vine covered in delicate pastel-colored flowers, and I concede it looks beautiful while climbing a trellis or wrapping itself around an iron railing.  You can buy the seed packets, and people often plant them around their decks or back porches.  That is all fine and good unless—and this is an all-caps UNLESS—you decide to plant a garden within three miles of your back porch.  If you are planning to plant a garden within three miles of your back porch, you best not be planting any Morning Glory.  It travels, and it doesn’t need the help of GPS to find your garden.  Once it arrives at your garden site, it sprouts and spreads, climbing and choking the life out of everything it can get its viney little hands on.  

I always believed Morning Glory to be a perennial, but according to gardeningknowhow.com, “Morning Glory is an annual, but reseeds itself so successfully, you really wouldn’t know it.”  Morning Glory, like Bermuda grass—one of my previous amendments to the nuclear holocaust statement—grows from rhizomes.  A rhizome is “a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its   nodes…” (en.m.wikipedia.org).  Rhizomes are also called creeping rootstalks.  That sounds about right.  Subterranean creeping rootstalks, throngs of ninja plants moving stealthily underground until they find a garden to invade.  In no time, your corn, pole beans and sweet potatoes will be covered with blooms not their own.

Until recently, I was all in favor of using chemical weed killer on the little suckers, but thanks to the slew of “Roundup causes cancer, call us so we can sue them” ads on TV, I decided to weed around my raised beds in a more nature-friendly way.  I went with raised beds this year, because I thought it might be easier on my aging body than the back-breaking work of hoeing.  I put the beds in a large abandoned dog pen, because it is surrounded by a tall chain link fence, and I figured it would be easier to keep the wild critters from helping themselves to a buffet of my vegetables.  I left the small wooden structure that served as shelter for the dogs who used to live there, just in case I decided to get another dog one day.

The area around my raised beds quickly sprouted weeds, including the ne’er do well Morning Glory.   I bought one of those weed-without-chemicals guides and began to read.  I tried boiling water, sugar, salt, dish liquid, cooking oil and vinegar.  After I emptied the pantry without success, I engaged Garey in the guide’s If-all-else-fails method of setting the weeds on fire with a blow torch.  It was working quite well, I’ll have to say, until the small wooden dog structure caught fire.  Luckily, our friend, Hank, was in the area feeding his cows, and he helped us put out the fire before it could ignite the wooden fence posts and Walnut tree nearby.   

I went back to the guide and read the section that suggested pulling the leaves off the weeds one at a time on a weekly basis, because the weed would wear itself out trying to produce more leaves, and it’s the leaves that are crucial in the photosynthesis that keeps the plant alive.  Do you know how long it would take me to pull each and every leaf off each and every weed that comes up in the area around my raised beds?  That’s right—too long!

I was so frustrated.  I went to the shed and got my hoe.  I began chopping the weeds around the raised beds, while asking myself how the heck, exactly, had the raised-bed method saved me the back-breaking work of hoeing?  At least, I said to myself, I am weeding organically.  You don’t get much more organic than a hoe.