Design

On a perfect spring afternoon, I was able to spend a couple of hours weeding, mulching, and transplanting lettuce, spinach, and radicchio seedlings. Tomorrow, I really need to pay attention to the meadow and perennial border, but the vegetables -- I guess they're pampered. They need attention, after all, being dependent on gardeners. The tough meadow plants and native perennials in my borders don't need much attention -- just freeing them from the cloak of weedy winter annuals, too many leaves (from my gardening companion's raking efforts), and a bit of final tidying up of last year's stems. Hmmm, clearly I take the 'don't be too tidy' prescription for good wildlife gardens to heart. My gardening companion says he's going to mow the 'lawn' tomorrow. It's gotten awfully shaggy, and if we didn't have (almost feral) neighborhood cats, we'd definitely have Eastern Cottontail nests in some of those grassy clumps.

I've always had a sneaking admiration for the adaptability of weedy species; they're amazingly flexible in their reproductive strategies -- annual (winter or summer), biennial, perennial -- either terrific seed producers or excellent vegetative spreaders. Lots of strategies! Weedy winter annuals love our mild winters, so I always get lots of exercise pulling them up in open mulched areas. Fortunately, they're easy to pull, creating mounds of compostable material (composted 'hot' if plants have gone to seed.) Weedy species vary in their success year to year, but since winter annuals are adapted to quick growth at low temperatures, relatively speaking, and producing flowers and fruits quickly in spring, it's hard to keep ahead of their seed production. And usually, I'm behind; even here in the Carolinas, it's often too inhospitable to get out and weed (uh, sometimes the weekends are cold and rainy, even if we do have perfectly nice days periodically in ...