Volunteer Grass: Friend or Thug? March 5, 2009

This breezy little grass showed up in my parking strip a couple of years ago. I don’t know where it came from, since I haven’t seen it in any neighbor’s gardens.

It’s in a silly spot, right at the edge of the sidewalk, but at least it flops over the other direction. I should probably move it, but first I’d like to know if it’s something I should keep around. I love the way grasses look, but I’m allergic to them so have not really welcomed too many into my garden. Any guesses on what it might be? Looks kind of like some stipas I’ve seen, but I’m certainly no expert.

One possible clue – it’s having babies!

Hm, maybe that means it’s likely to want to take over. I didn’t notice these sprouts in previous years – maybe the hard winter did something to put the plant into a frenzy of spring replication??

It’s funny how the definition of a weed is just a plant in a place we don’t want it. Since I tend to be a cheap and disorganized type of gardener, I usually welcome self-sowers with open arms. But I don’t want to let a real thug get established! I’ll be curious to see if anyone has an ID.Thanks!

Novel Way to Clear Brush December 29, 2008

A musician friend just bought a rather neglected property on a small lake in Seattle. She’s a really energetic person and will no doubt have a great time diving into the project of renovating the house and grounds. In fact, she’s already started on the overgrown yard, with a little help from some friends…

Goats! She got them (temporarily) from a local business, The Goat Lady, who hires them out for a quiet, natural way to clear brambles and other tenacious overgrowth. With the copious amounts of blackberries at my friend’s place, five goats couldn’t get through it all in one day. They took a break for the holidays/snow but will be back to finish the job soon.

This is such a cool way to take care of a tough gardening job! You arrange to have the goats delivered, check on them a couple of times per day to make sure they’re not tangled up in their tethers, give them once a day water and feed, and that’s that! Super cheap too, $25 per goat per week if you have 5 or more, $30 per goat if you have 4 or fewer. Dump fees alone for that volume of brush would probably top that, not to mention labor, pollution from gas-powered tools, or even backhoe rental for a job of that magnitude. To learn more about the goats, click here.

Apparently this is not the only business of this sort in Washington State. Here’s a link to a Seattle city page about using another company’s goats to clear brush at a power plant not far from our house.
In the city of Seattle, it is now legal to keep up to three pygmy goats, as long as they are de-horned. Goats in the city! For a news article about this, click here.

Finally, if you have a few minutes to spare and click on this link, you can watch the goats in action at my friend’s place. She put some funny background music in to complement their munchings. Which goat is your favorite? I like the black and white one with the stripey face myself.

Weedin’ Wednesday September 24, 2008

Folks on Blotanical, the gardening blog round-up site, have a tradition called “Bloomin’ Tuesday,” where they share photos of what’s flowering in their gardens each week. I’m not suggesting a knock-off or anything, but since I never seem to get around to the Tuesday tradition, I made up one of my own for this week: “Weedin’ Wednesday.”

I hadn’t been out to check on the parking strip garden in a while, beyond just glancing at it on my way elsewhere, so I hauled out my trusty pickle bucket, pruners and trowel to see what was growing there without my permission.

It wasn’t too bad, so I’ll spare you individual photos of each culprit. It took me a while to fill up the bucket with an assortment of unwanted or unsightly invaders – quack grass, spent California poppies, St. John’s wort seedlings (three full years after eradication and they’re still coming back – I’ve heard it can take five or longer, and that it can regenerate from any part of the plant!?!), various dandelion relatives. Now that the rains are setting in, I’m sure they’ll start to really get going.

I figure every weed I pull now is exponentially fewer that I have to nab next spring. Then again, it may be false economy, especially in places that don’t have something else going in to keep the weeds from just coming back again in the same place. At least I find weeding to be therapeutic, in small doses anyway.

Gayla at You Grow Girl wrote this thought-provoking post about stuff that ends up in her street garden. She seems to be braving a much more urban environment than mine, with a lot of puzzling and dispiriting human behavior impacting her efforts to beautify the neighborhood. I’m pretty lucky, the only thing I’ve found in months was this piece of candy wrapper, which could have been there for a while, hiding under stuff:

I have got to be more ruthless now and next year about pulling out the seemingly endless parade of aster seedlings. It’s so hard to yank out stuff I know will eventually produce pretty flowers and provide food for the bees and butterflies, but they are really taking over and are just too tall to be where they are – they’re cutting the light for some of my other plants. Here’s a shot of what they look like as tiny babies – they’re in the foreground, some of the leaves have rust spots. The marigold pictured was a volunteer, I think, but is well-behaved so I let it stay. The thing that looks like a string of red licorice (hm, must have candy on the brain after finding that wrapper) is a shoot from the “Pink Panda” strawberry that I will also have everywhere if I’m not careful…

All better now. Well, I left more poppies and bachelor’s buttons than I probably should have, but what can I say, I’m weak where their cheery recurrence is concerned. Plan for tomorrow: buy mulch so I don’t have to do this so often!