WEEDING

It’s hard to weed, it's hard to be young, it’s hard to do the things that have to be done.

Just now thinking, as I was weeding the garden too long neglected, how I’d had to learn (and later teach the grandaughter trio) to tell the weeds from the feeds, and thence in weedly fashion I got to thinking about a defensive critique I’d read recently about the Humanities (they now have to be defended!), how beneficial they are in nurturing the most important quality in living: an interesting and interested life.

Most significantly, the Humanities are not taught primarily in preparation for employment, which seems to be the astigmatic purpose of most education in our time - for a career that ends when you retire - but in an ancient understanding of preparation for life, in laying the groundwork for cultivating a broad mind with interests that sustain imagination and curiosity in new aspects at every age.

In my case, it nourished my hunger to read, and then to write, led me to travel for new knowledge; I'm still exploring after all these years, an 'alien' in 'foreign' lands: what greater source of  ongoing natural education (children, grandchildren, world, peoples, cultures, languages, gardening, monkeys, firewood etc.) as a way of life, unlike linear training that in time becomes outmoded, less and less part of a life that looks forward to retirement... The humanities, in contrast, are integral to life beyond its end.

Which is not to say that other fields of study don't offer these benefits in varying degrees, but the Humanities provide the broadest cast of all. All this flowed to mind (suggestively, while weeding) because the Humanities are being dissed these days as having the least income value, when in fact they are the reliable source of the greatest wealth-- not the external kind that incrementally isolates and uneases, but the kind that accrues within oneself, inner riches to enjoy and share for a life entire.

BOB AND THE BEANSTALKS

This morning was nice and sunny so I spent some early time in the garden checking on the beans I planted in the autumn, staked with a bamboo lattice and covered with broad netting and fine mesh to protect them from the snow, thereby rendering them inaccessible and largely invisible.

I lifted off those layers and exposed the graphic reality of beanstalks and dirt left on their own for 3 months, saw that succulent weeds had sidled in from the cold to enjoy the warm serenity of beanworld, and that the beanstalks and the weeds had become good friends, the stalks rejecting my inviting bamboo framework in favor of base groveling, wrapping their tendrils around feckless weedery in the lowest form of companionship, the kind mothers warn their young teens about.

In order to free the beanstalks from their iniquity, that they might better to pursue the natural instincts of their breeding and reach the full bean potential that is their birthright, I had to break up these earthy relationships, and as I went along I saw in every instance - every instance, as though it were a completely natural thing - which I suppose, looking back on my own life, it is - that the beanstalks had preferred tendrilizing with the weeds, not in a single instance grabbing onto the convenient bamboo, over which in some cases the beanstalks had even grown downward to reach the weeds!

There beside them was offered a bamboo structure that would lift them to levels of which they were capable; that would elevate them to greater, sunnier, more productive heights, yet instead they leaned heavily toward their baser instincts, bent to the bottom of their world, acted against their own benefit and potentially toward their own detriment; that’s one of the problems with new youth, even of the beany kind.

There is a lesson here - if I may be so didactic, and having been so thus far, I will - one which I could have followed better myself, had I in my earlier life been even slightly more aware of the benefits of the metaphorically speaking bamboo framework that had been prepared for the beanstalk I was; on the other hand, however, there is something to be said for the weeds, the heady benefit of that lower perspective, that sense of implacability you take with you when at last you unbend and strive upward-- it makes you tougher, makes you more patient, renders you less needful of hope and more in possession of grit. So go low, beans, go low if you must, but don’t stay there too far into Spring; and above all, do not abide the weedy path...

To add weight to my inner words I disassembled the whole bamboo framework, expelled the weeds and from the overpoles suspended lengths of rough gardening twine about a foot apart, hanging down helpfully among all the suddenly weedless beanstalks looking around like new graduates of Legume U.

The world awaits you all, my beans; tomorrow is yours!

THEIR KIND OF LIFE

Last year at around this time, when I was more botanically ruthless (had less ruth?) than I am now - may it ever be so - I mowed down all the dokudami that clustered naturally here and there, with leaves like dark-green ruby-trimmed hearts.

In my hopefully diminishing ignorance I viewed them not as desirable plants, but as noxious weeds, simply because they now grew where they wanted, having spread beyond where they'd been planted.

That evening I regretted what I had done when here and there in the darkening I saw the remotely surviving remnants with white-jade teardrop buds put forth their solo white blossoms with golden hearts, bright even in the dusk, like stars on the ground.

So yesterday and today, when I mowed I mowed around wherever the dokudami were now thriving in their dusky green cloisters, thanks to their hard work of winter now come to fruition.

This evening I am rewarded as those green gatherings of their kind of life unfold their blossoms in the same pure-white, golden-hearted hope of tomorrow that we ourselves bring forth in the darks of our days, that this path be the true one...

Beautiful and countless things we hold in common with the natural world...

KNOWLEDGE RULES!

If you'd asked me yesterday what I thought of hairy vetch, I'd likely have backed away and looked at you suspiciously. If you asked me the same thing today, I'd conclude you were a knowledgeable gardener. Interesting thing about knowledge, how rapidly it transforms one's opinions.

This morning I was looking at that prolific plant whose face and pushy manner I knew so well from lo, these many seasons - but whose name I knew not - that each Spring pops up after the cleavers and chickweed have gone and grows all over my garden and flower beds clearly wanting to take over-- I found it thriving in the corner of my front flower bed and made a note to myself to later get the hand scythe and clear it out of there, then I went online to find out what the nasty, pushy stuff was: appropriately, it was named "hairy vetch" (vicia villosa).

The pictures were accompanied by this text: "In the course of these 18 years study, we ... screened more than 2000 plants and found potential allelopathic plants useful for sustainable agriculture. From the potent allelopathic plants, we isolated several new bioactive chemicals and some of them were patented. As for direct application for the farm, Velvetbean (Mucuna pruriens) ... and hairy vetch (Vicia villosa) ... are now gradually spreading as allelopathic cover crop in Japan and in some other parts of the world. Hairy vetch is now accepted by Japanese farmers and recommended as cover plants for the vegetation control of fallow, abandoned field, and orchard."

Then I opened my email and found this in the Organic Gardening newsletter from Rodale: "If you love the flavor of juicy, ripe, home-grown tomatoes—then remember these four simple words: Sow! Cut! Plant! Pluck! These magic words are the key to "can't-miss" tomatoes that require virtually no weeding and hardly any watering—and they give you red, ripe tomatoes sooner than you ever imagined! The "hairy" secret is hairy vetch—a miracle plant used by farmers all over America to build the fertility of their soil. The trick is to sow this nitrogen-boosting, soil-protecting plant in the fall. Cut it down two weeks before you set out your tomatoes. Plant your seedling in a hole you cut in the dried vetch. And pluck the best no-work tomatoes you ever grew! It's as easy as 1-2-3-4! The thick vetch will smother any weeds that would even dare to pop up—and it helps keep soil and your tomato plants nice and moist!"

When sapience rains on my head, it pours! Now I'm not only going to let that wonderful plant Hairy Vetch - that miracle plant with the wonderful name - stay where it is and proliferate, I'm going to save its precious seeds and plant them as my garden ground cover in the fall.

Knowledge rules!

And the monkeys will love my tomatoes.