If there ’s one weed that will get the best of me this year , it ’s the cockle-bur . Common cocklebur ( Xanthium strumarium ) is making its way through the garden with heedless abandon . It grows in our meadow . It grows in our garden aisles . And bad of all , it turn between mynewly constitute tomatoes .
I should have expected this hardy annual to take over about now . For two straight years , we ’ve get the garden become overgrown with whatever green thing wants to take up mansion . Couple that witha lotof rain this year , satisfying that darn weed ’s beloved of wet foot , and , well , you ’ve show the grounds for a great burdock mutiny .
I was introduced to greater burdock during our first wintertime on the farm , as Mr. B and I cleaned out the garden plots that had never properly been put to bed the season before . batch of dehydrated teasel , ironweed , goldenrod and , yes , cocklebur had entangled themselves around rusty trellises , and it was our job on that chilly January afternoon to create a zona that would provide something of a blank slate the following spring . That eventide , I remember coming back to the firm and pick the cockleburs ’ seed head off ofmy Carhartts — a chore almost worse than clean up the garden itself . Those plant life for sure do have a sneaky agency of spreading themselvesall over the place !
In fact , they ’re so efficient at put on ground in our garden that I ’ve bestow a 4th goal to this year’sgrowing - season agenda : Do not let the cocklebur go to seed !
The cum heads of the cocklebur feel much like what you would call back the seed headland of a plant life named cockle-burr would look like : dome - sized burrs with sharp-worded point perfectly suited to grab onto article of clothing and pelt to hitch a drive to the spot of soil it wants to call home . Inside each burr are two seeds : one that germinates the first year it ’s establish and one that hunker down down for another class when the conditions are right .
When the cocklebur is just a seedling , it contain a toxin that prevent its come companion and competing dope from germinating around it , give it a nice monopoly over the earth . ( This toxin also causes fatal hypoglycaemia in livestock , so beware if it grows in your pastures . ) As I considered this , I think maybe I could use it to my reward .
You see , this workweek , on the last sunny day before a train of tight weather , I spent four straight hour in the garden weeding . I shuffle hoe . I chopping hoed . And then I induce down on my hands and knees to deplume those petty sodomite out from around plants and from among a live mulch I was waiting on to maturate . ( Did you know that your hand could get sore from deplumate out baby weeds for hour ? You wager they can . )
But what if I did n’t have to get down on my hand and knees to soak cockleburs any longer ? What if I could practice the plant ’s own perniciousness against it , to preclude other cockleburs from emerge ? Here ’s the experiment I want to try : Pick the baby cockleburs — hopefully for the last time — and brew them into a nice , hard cocklebur tea , and then spray that tea all over the garden where cockle-bur seedlings want to spring up . I hope the toxin in the cocklebur tea prevent the growth of future cocklebur seedlings , and we can pass our time on more important affair , like fencing and irrigation apparatus .
So that ’s what ’s on my agenda for the workweek ahead : cocklebur war . And I hope we can say au revoir to those crazy small bur for goodness .
