Springtime Reckoning

We interrupt this regularly scheduled episode of the Blackberry Project to bring you…

Weeding Season

Spring is beautiful.

Spring is also a little brutal.

Because in the fall, the weeds have been eaten by the trusty weed eater, and trimmed, and are behaving. I can cover them with layers of  cardboard, compost, grass clippings, and leaf mulch, then scatter my wildflower seeds and have the crazy hope that they will grow when it is the proper time. I can dream that the weeds resting beneath are vanquished.

In spring, it is clear that the weeds were not vanquished.

Did I read somewhere that weed seeds can remain viable for 1000 years? Maybe not that long, but something close.

So I am not just fighting the weeds that showed up last year, seeds from the ferny weeds that got away from me. I am also fighting all the years when I didn’t think about the weeds, or someone else didn’t think about them. The seeds have been lying in wait. Spring is when they come alive. My yard today is covered in nonnative grasses, ferny Velcro weeds that look a lot like poppies when they are first emerging, clover weeds, and dandelions.

So many dandelions.

Actually, I am trying to rethink my opinion of dandelions, to let them grow and not be so worried about them. The flowers really are cheerful and bright. Also, the leaves are apparently high in vitamins and are excellent to eat! Except I have tried them and they are crazily bitter.

Which sent me on an internet hunt to find ways to make them less bitter. Apparently, if you boil the heck out of them, some of the bitterness leaches away. But then, also wouldn’t you boil away the nutrition, which is sort of the reason to eat them in the first place?

Anyway. I have not yet discovered a way to make the dandelions tasty. Also, there are just so many of them.

(What would it mean to welcome them? How would that feel? I’m trying.)

I don’t long for dandelions, though. I long for lupine and Chinese houses and all the other native wildflowers that used to cover this part of California in the spring.

But all is not lost.

I have a new wildflower patch where I almost forgot that I scattered seeds last fall.

I think there are less annoying ferny Velcro burr weeds. Maybe?

Except I  just want them to be gone. I want this little patch of earth to be restored to its beautiful native wildness. Can we agree that yesterday would have been a good time for that?  Is it too much to want this place to be home to the plants that are supposed to be here, and just those plants, and not all these other rascally, poky, sharp, skin tearing things?

Most days,  I wander around the yard, weed bag in hand, and hold my breath, hoping against hope that I am finally getting the weeds under control. Maybe this weed, this one that I just pulled? Maybe it will be the last one? Until I go a step or two further, and find more.

It’s not just ubiquitous ferny Velcro weeds. I am also getting very tired of teeny hawthorn trees. I have several large hawthorns in the front and backyards, and each year they sow seeds that lead to hundreds of babies. The plum trees do the same thing. You especially have to stay on top of the hawthorns, because they have evil spikes, and if they get bigger than an inch or so, they will tear you up when you try to yank them up without gloves. Which I usually do not wear when I am taking five minutes to do my daily quick ramble around the yard.

These trees are not natives. They are not supposed to be here.

Sometimes, I’ll find a baby oak tree, or a small pine. I do my best to help these along.

I put rocks around them, in hopes that they’ll escape the weed eater when it roars through the next time. The weed eater seems to destroy the small native trees. It doesn’t hurt the plums or the hawthorns much. They get shorn, and pop up again a few days later.

The dreaded blackberry bushes do the same thing.

I keep writing about my blackberry project, and have stated (maybe a little too confidently) that all I have to do to be successful is to keep showing up. To be faithful to the process and stop worrying about the outcome. To know that it is a long journey, this attempt at restoring the native to this place that was mined and (we think) also used as a dumping ground. My neighbors, who live just down the hill from me, and I have found countless old bottles, pieces of broken pottery, and rusty bits of who knows what as we’ve dug into the soil.

But here’s what I know.

Every time I go out in the yard and get discouraged because I keep finding weeds (lots of weeds), and am impatient with myself and my progress (shouldn’t I be done with this weeding already?) I miss the joy of what is growing, what is healing, what has changed.

It’s slow, the change.

It is a little annoying that there is a spiritual lesson here for me.

Because true change is slow in me as well.

There are countless parts of my life where I would like things to be set, fixed, completed. I would like  my inner weeds gone. Yesterday would have been nice for this, too. Except it’s a long process that doesn’t happen in a day. All I can do is keep showing up. That’s how my yard changes. That’s how I change.  Little by little. Day by day. A handful of weeds. A sprinkling of compost. A handful of seeds.