damn weeds...

the one thing i was most excited about when i bought my house was to finally have my very own yard & garden. i'm sure at some point i'll get sick of tending to it each week, but for right now i love it. what i don't love at the moment is spending an hour each night weeding. 

and then today i discovered that i'm not just doing any old weeding, i'm fighting an uphill battle with a severely invasive weed...the black swallow-wort...aka: the devil weed...

apparently this little sucker came over from europe to ipswich, ma in 1854...ten years later it escaped from the botanic garden and has been causing trouble ever since. it grows everywhere too; sun or shade, moist or dry areas, acid or alkaline soils. and, lucky for us, it has no known enemies since it's poisonous to insects and animals, so it's free to spread like wild fire. even more exciting news, it's spreads two ways; 1. by wind-blown seeds and 2. by underground stems that sprout into new plant clumps.


so, other than hand digging out the roots you can very carefully use round-up to kill these suckers. problem is, when they sprout up in the middle of your shrubs or flowers you're likely to kill them too. here's a little hand-out that was passed around my office about these little jerks...