by Mike Bendzela at 3 Quarks Daily: Today is a bit of an experiment. I take the row covers off of two forty-foot rows of beans (three varieties) as the plants have become so big so fast in the ungodly heat they are pressing against the cloth. Afterwards, in the early evening, I let the chickens out of their sweltering little house to run free for a couple of hours. I will watch them to see if they bother the plants. The birds might peck at and scratch up the bean plants, but these plants are so large the birds should be indifferent to them. The experiment is a success: The plants bask in full sunlight while the birds rummage for grubs around them. I decide to leave the row covers off for now and will recover them at night to deter the deer. One’s smallness is manifested in gardening, as the gardener is a single organism set against myriads. It is wise to tend to one’s insignificance during these times. Come what may, no one will care much about those who stay at home husbanding rows of Maxibel haricots.
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With the row covers off, I can spend a sweaty half-hour or so weeding the thick crab grasses, galinsoga, and lamb’s quarters growing between the rows. Some of these are introduced plants, meaning the garden is a symbol of human perturbation of the biosphere in more ways than one. You must take care to grasp the weeds down low to remove whole plants from the soil because plants break off easily near the root, and you don’t want the weeds regrowing from the remaining root mass. This is especially troublesome with the grasses, which feature thick root mats. An evolutionary adaptation is at work here: Had prehistoric grazing ruminants been able to pull whole plants out of the ground with their teeth, that would have spelled the end of that plant variety. Grass varieties with regenerative stems and rugged roots survived grazing, persisted, and thus multiplied. For millions of years during the Miocene Epoch, grasses outwitted the horsey lips of Parahippus and the like. In the garden, I just have to stay ahead of them. They will outwit me if I get lazy, so it is a battle that never ends. Like dealing with contemporary stressors, patience and tenacity are key.
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Galinsoga is a plain-Jane weed that can sort of imitate the crop it is plaguing, thus evading detection. As you weed, it will suddenly appear near a plant like an afterthought: Say what? Crab grasses always look like crab grasses, but they can hide between plants and crowd out the very stems of the crop plant. You push aside a bean plant, find grass, and say, I thought so! Lamb’s quarters, with its spike of goose-foot-shaped leaves, stands out insolently, like thought-deadening slogans. You rip out whole plants, one by one, but it takes time. Your reward will be a year’s worth of glass jars full of pressure-canned green and wax beans. Now is a good time to focus on securing the things you set store by.
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The chickens are chuckling all around me as I weed between the rows. I hear them scratching and shuffling through leaf mold mulch in the under-story of the nearby asparagus which have begun to spread their ferns. These chickens, Golden Comets, have had much of their flightiness bred out of them: you can walk right up to some of them, who go into lordosis, a sort of “squatting” to prepare for mounting, and you can pick them up off the ground. The chuckling and scratching is truly ancient behavior that goes back to the prehistoric junglefowls of Southeast Asia, and perhaps even further to the theropods of the Jurassic. Egg-by-egg, these traits were passed down for tens of millions of years. Take that, Homo colossus.† Even your ziggurats come to dust…
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