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Gardening With Dora
I have moved once since then and didn't think I brought any with me, but they must have realized what was happening and tagged along for the ride. Well, it turns out that they loved my garden (both of them) and now I spend a lot of time on my knees with my dandelion puller trying to eradicate them. They look awful in the lawn - even when they're blooming. They laugh at herbicide. Wood violets are tricky. They bloom in early spring and don't put up a seed pod until late summer or early fall. Before you are on to them you assume that the ones you see sprouting around are not spreading and they don't have seed, so you have all the time in the world to pull them up. Trust me, the dozen or so seeds in each seed pod will definitely come up. I got careless with wild strawberry plants, too. I thought the tiny little strawberries would be good wildlife food, so I left the first one I saw. They must be excellent wild bird food since I now see them everywhere. Wild strawberry spreads by above-ground stems which peg down in every direction from the mother plant. They are easy enough to pull up, but you must search about to find all of the plants. The solitary one you miss only seems to be encouraged by your efforts and begins immediately to establish a family of its own. Good intentions in the garden are not always rewarded either. I got a huge load of ground mulch from the city and spent days spreading it about everywhere. The plants and earthworms loved it, but now I have ragweed...and black walnut trees. The black walnut trees aren't much of a problem, since not all that many germinated, but try to find all the ragweed before it blooms and spreads. Difficult. I must be learning though. I refused a free load of horse manure which would have been wonderful to overdress everything in the fall. Who knows what those horses have been eating! At least the load of chicken manure I layered all over didn't have any viable, noxious weed seeds in it. My neighbors have begun to speak to me again...except the one directly downwind.
Dora Garrick Fleming is a Clarke County native living and gardening in Winder, Ga.
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