Build it and they will come.
Before this summer, I didn’t know much about farming. Like how farmers get up at dawn to draw water, pick beans and whisper sweet nothings to their tomato blossoms.
But weeds, that was easy. One or two vagrants might appear only to taken care of with nothing more than an elegant dance of me, sprits of dirt and Lily garden gloves.
I was woefully mistaken. So enraptured by the appearance of my produce yields, I turned a blind eye to the first few squatters. Soon entire families of weeds set up a botanical KOA with little hook-ups entrenched deep underground. My corn stood shackled deep in crabgrass shag carpeting. Some imposters loomed so large, I wasn’t sure if they were teenage corn plants.
Needing reinforcements for battle, I called the children. Dissension festered in the ranks.
“Mama, I cannot weed. I’m afraid to lose my toes,” pronounced my nine year-old daughter with arms crossed and feet firmly set.
A neighbor had told her to be careful hoeing — for one can easily hack off a toe. So for my daughter, ridding the garden of weeds now meant crushed bone, jagged flesh and nubby feet. The only thing stronger than the will of a weed to survive is my child’s desire to keep her toes. I gave up on getting Hannah Kate to help out in the garden. Or ever being within 10 feet of any yard tool.
Going it alone, I spied a cocky fellow, grabbed hold and pulled. This resulted in handful of green shoots and a root taunting me, “You silly woman, you may have won this battle, but I shall rise once again from the ashes like the great metropolis 50 miles to our east.”
Late each night, I lay sleepless in bed listening to their plotting outside my window. The crabgrass was to overtake the corn. The dandelions were to infiltrate the okra under cover of sweet potato vines. (The sweet potatoes, for heaven’s sakes. Who knew they would be the ones to capitulate?) Terrified zucchini circled younger transplants and discussed uprooting to the safety of my neighbor’s raised bed.
Hoping to understand what motivated these voracious green beasts to reach their tentacles three feet underground and bore into granite bedrock, I crawled inside the mind of my nemesis. Rolled around in his little green pelt. He had been here first, eons before me and my upstart garden. One of us had to go.
Risking life and toe, I set to battle with my hoe. Well, first I needed to buy a hoe. Not exactly sure what a hoe looked like, I rummaged through some boxes in the attic and found a child’s Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit book and took it to the store.
Armed with my shiny new farm implement, I began clawing and railing away to the heavens, “As God as my witness, I will never go this long without weeding again.”
After a few hours of sweat and tears, the tide began to turn my way…then the weeds regained a foothold.
Right then and there — in the heat and steam of the battlefield — I experienced an awakening. A large part of me has always been a sweet potato collaborator.
