There was a war going on, and it was on the verge of being lost.
The spring campaign started out well enough. I deployed the pig on an eight foot by eight foot grid, letting him root out the enemy and sanitize the ground. Every time he advanced, I followed up, preparing the ground with trenches and hills, then deployed my forces: The peppers and the potatoes, the turnips and the tomatoes. Laid down suppressive mulch to keep the bad guys down where I could.
Then the bombardment began.
I swear it lasted six weeks. I’ve never seen anything like it – dozens, hundreds of millimetres, coming down from the murky grey sky in an unrelenting barrage. The land was reduced to an impassable, unplantable morass of mud and puddles. The pig bogged down. Even walking was risky – one wrong step and your boot disappeared forever.
My plants were tough, but not all of them could handle it. Some of the tomatoes drowned. Some of the potatoes rotted. I couldn’t advance, could hardly keep even. It was all I could do to dig drainage ditches.
And through it all, the enemy counter-attacked. I saw them – the weeds – and I could see their strategy. They sought to take advantage of the bombardment and their whining, buzzing air support. They crept in from all sides, shrinking the perimeter daily. They infiltrated the trenches and climbed the hills, getting in close and tight with my plants, choking them out.
The weeds aimed to retake this ground, and there were so many of them.
The dandelions and the burdock: Fickle plants, sometimes allies, sometimes foes. All a matter of location. They like to get in close with my plants and dig in. You’ve got to dig them out the hard way or they’ll sneak back after you’ve moved on.
The grass and clover: Pretty, and useful for supporting the animals in my supply train, but too often in the wrong place at the wrong time. They aren’t dangerous; they’re just persistent.
Thistles. Two variants of them – the tall, stocky ones with purple flowers, and the wide, stocky ones. You can’t get in close with them, the spines’ll rip you to shreds. You gotta hack apart the foliage, lop off their tops and pour vinegar or salt straight down their throats.
And the nettles. Packs of them, insiduously spreading just under the ground and then thrusting upward to dominate the nitrate-rich battlefields. Touch ’em and they’ll sting you. If you’re going to take them out, you’ve got to be armored up.
And finally, the wild parsnip. My nemesis. The Tiger Tank of weeds. The USS Iowa of weeds. The F-22 of weeds. Its mission is ground superiority and it does it well. It advances in waves, climbing two feet high; four feet high; six feet high; eight feet high, until it towers over you with its yellow flowery head and broad greenery and dares you to do something. Chopping their heads off from a distance doesn’t work. They’ll just grow back, and the flowers on the decapitated stalks will turn upward like little zombie blossoms and try to mature enough to release their cargo of seedy pestilence. Try to come in closer and they’ll come right back at you. Every drop of sap is toxic for days afterward. If you get too brave or cocky and go in unprotected, it’ll react with your skin, raising gruesome blisters and triggering a relentless, burning itch that keeps a man up at night. I’ve got the scars to prove it, lad.
No – if you want to kill a wild parsnip, you’ve got to get right up and personal. Wrap your hands around it. Pull against that foot-long tap-root. Take that toxic son-of-a-bitch clean out of the ground, get rid of the dirt and throw him to the sheep, knowing full well that it’ll make you pay for every mistake you make.
Yeah, all those weeds were out there. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.
And standing against them – not a lot. No vehicle support – rototillers couldn’t operate in these conditions and weedwhackers couldn’t penetrate the parsnip’s quarter-inch thick stalks. Couldn’t use the pig – he’d eat anything in his path, weed or produce alike. Couldn’t use chemicals, either – never mind the ethical considerations, my plants have to live here afterward, dammit!
No, it all came down to me. The poor, bloody gardener.
A window of opportunity opened up. The skies ran out of moisture on Friday, bringing the bombardment to an end. Saturday was ominously quiet as the land drained and the mud dried. Sunday – today – would be the day I fought back.
I rose early. Kissed my wife goodbye. Sent the poultry out to provide cover against mosquitoes, knowing they’d do their best but were heavily outnumbered. I donned my armor: The moisture-resistent blue snow pants, the yellow latex gloves, the battered rubber boots, and the plaid, long-sleeved shirt. Wrapped a bandana around my forehead to keep the sweat out of my eyes and off my glasses during the long battle to come.
I gathered my whetstone and began to sharpen my scythe. My weapon of choice in conflicts like this, it cut down weeds with its razor-sharp blade: A two foot long arc of glistening, weed-killing steel. And when that blade was sharpened finely enough to cut falling leaves, I took a deep breath, opened the gate, and stepped through.
God, there were so many of them.
It was tempting to start on grass and clover. They’d be easy targets, unable to fight back or stand against the scythe. But that’s what they wanted me to do – to pick the easy fight while the nettles and parsnips dug in and went to seed. They were the weeds I had to target, or this campaign was over.
So I advanced through the disputed territory, telling my plants to hold tough: I’d be back. I settled on my strategy: Hit the unplanted ground first, where I didn’t have to worry about inflicting collateral damage. Take down as many of them as I could, then go to hand-to-hand combat when I reached my valiant lines of raspberries and blackberries.
I attacked the east flank, a yellow, blue, and plaid vision of weed-chopping fury. The scythe swished and sliced, splattering the landscape with sap, shredded leaves, and decapitated stalks. The weeds couldn’t stand against us. They died by the dozen but I told myself not to get overconfident – this was the weeds’ weak flank, defended by their smaller, younger plants.
Soon, I was in their rear, and I resolved to come right back up the middle. That was where they were strongest. That was where the battle would be decided. I paused to re-sharpen the scythe and resumed the attack.
Conditions were tougher. The ground was rutty in places, and the weeds were so much tougher. Those parsnips towered over me and I had to take them one at a time. Their stalks, up to an inch and a half wide, held up against repeated blows from the scythe. Still, I slowly gained ground, standing on shredded piles of the fallen while I hacked down the living.
And the unthinkable happened.
I powered the scythe into a brute of a parsnip and the blade fell away.
I gathered up the pieces and fell back in disarray to the front yard. What had happened? Could it be salvaged? Could I get the scythe back in action before it was too late?
No.
The tell-tale signs of metal fatigue were too obvious. The bracket holding blade to handle had failed irrepairably. The scythe was dead. At a stroke, I had suffered a terrible set-back. Out in the battlefield, the weeds quivered in delight.
But all was not lost.
Over in the small barn was an old friend: Rusty. Formerly a prized antique, he’d been outed as a replica cavalry sabre a decade earlier. He’d spent many a year since being used to open feed bags, cut bale twine, and stood ready for the unlikely event of an inattentive fox in the henhouse.
I gathered up Rusty and gave him a few practice swings; his basket hilt made it awkward to swing use left-handed, and his blade, while longer than the scythe, lacked the long reach that the scythe handle had provided. But he was light, and swinging him was natural. Long neglected as he may have been, Rusty was ready, willing, and able.
They say the age of the sword is long past, but they hadn’t seen Rusty and I at work. The weeds didn’t know what hit them. Swing high, lop off the flowers. Backswing across the middle. Hack down to leave just enough to yank out later. Step up to the next weed and let fly again.
Soon I’d cleared the centre. That just left the west flank – a broad expanse of tall, leafy plants I didn’t really care about, with small groups of parsnip lurking within. It was seek-and-destroy time: wading through the shoulder-high greenery, Rusty raised overhead. Ninety-five percent boredom, then five percent sheer terror as I came face to face with a parsnip, backstepped, and cut it apart.
It was turning into a rout. The parsnips were down. The nettles had taken casualties. I’d wiped out the worst concentrations and so I set Rusty down and tore into the battered but determined lines of raspberries, ripping apart the parsnips and nettles cowering within, then grunting and twisting and yanking out their roots and throwing them away.
At long last, it was over.
Sweating, itching, and bleeding, I returned to the front yard, head held high. Set Rusty down and stripped out of my sap-soaked armor. Hit the shower, applied anti-inflammatory ointment, and downed an anti-histamine. And then I greeted my wife with news that the day had won. Our plants would live. We would have fruits and vegetables after all.
Gardening is hell, friend.
Please note that the wife wailed in despair, and snarled and snapped at the loss of her burdocks, her big nettle patch (the second that the man has taken out this year! dang it) and what do you mean you cut down my barley patch!
None the less, the story itself kicks butt and sums up the spring in the garden.. LOVE IT!!
Just another Day on the Farm 