Practical Weed Control

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MY GRANDMOTHER got more excited over dandelion greens than anyone else I have known; but they are really good eating.

When I was growing up an only child on a farm before television, dandelions occupied a lot of my time in the spring. Gathering bouquets for my mother and blowing the seeds were great fun, but the science lessons I learned using the stems were truly amazing. I spent hours collect ing and assembling miniature aqueducts. I can still feel the joy of seeing water come out of the end of along pipeline of dandelion stems, especially when it had been made to travel uphill by siphoning.

If you find dandelion flowers to be unattractive, look again. They are one of the first flowers of spring. That beautiful yellow can be nothing short of a reflection of the sun's goodness. I love the yellow flowers complemented by the spring green of our lawn. I wasn't always so philosophically in love with dandelions. The first spring in our house 26 years ago I spent the better part of a day stabbing dandelions below the ground and pulling them. I filled the wheelbarrow twice. I thought I was making a nice lawn. What a waste of time. Much better to enjoy the flowers. Actually, there are fewer of them now that I value them more highly.

Those early flowers are very important to the health of bees in your neighborhood. They need the pollen after a winter without flowers. We gardeners will need the bees later to pollinate some of our crops.

I'm not through with the goodness of dandelions. That tap root of theirs goes deep into the ground, opening up passageways and gathering nutrients which it brings to the surface. It's my guess that the dandelions fertilized my lawn and made it a good place for grass to grow. The grass got stronger and now it is more difficult for the dandelions to get a root hold. Those two wheelbarrow loads of dandelions were a good addition to the compost so that effort wasn't really a waste after all.

When we decide something is one way or another we frequently close our minds to a lot of possibilities. Before Copernicus discovered that the earth was not the center of the universe the calculation of the movement of the heavenly bodies was horrendously difficult. The plots of the movement of the planets in their "movement around the earth" is laughable today. Even though everything fell into place with Copernicus's theory, it was violently disputed for many years.

Of course the reason it took so long to accept the Copernican view of the universe was that man had placed himself in the center and it was a bit of a downer to find that we were elsewhere. If I can con vince you that weeds are, or at least may be, good, it may open up a new world for you.

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