Monthly Archives: September 2008

Okay, so I lied.

I ended my last post with the promise that I would get into the garden “tomorrow” with my camera so I could produce evidence of my essential, if not absolute, victory over bindweed.

And here it is, all of—yoiks, a week?—later, and no such evidence has been produced. In my defense, I will enter the following facts:

a) I am now in Newfoundland, Canada, travelling with husband Steve and both my parents, and have had little time to post, and

b) I did take the requisite picture(s), I just didn’t do anything relevant with them. (Lousy excuse, I know, but the best I could come up with on vacation.)

c) Posting during the day or so before I left (the day or so after the last post) was a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and political impossibility because I was packing, something at which I am terminally bad, and trying as well to get the garden ready for my two-week absence.

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Bindweed #2: Digging it out

Several days ago I mentioned the bindweed question I’d gotten from someone by e-mail, and started this long, involved answer. This is the second installment.

So far I’ve gotten one response, from Mr. McGregor’s Daughter, detailing a novel way of handling bindweed: she snips the stem and dabs the cut end with a cotton swab dipped in Roundup. Read all about it on her blog.

When I look at the number of shoots coming up in Laura’s garden, I quail at the thought of dabbing each one with a bit of anything. Of course, once you see what I’m recommending below, you may think I’ve got my priorities seriously skewed. I prefer to drastically reduce the number of sprouts and then kill off those that remain with a method like the cotton swab favored by Mr. McG’s Daughter.

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August Singularity

Note: I've changed names here because I don't want to invade anyone's privacy.

Around eleven-thirty this morning, driving north towards the shopping mall where I had a meeting at Borders, I saw several signs of change: a new street-light at Dead Man’s Gulch, an aspen sporting yellow leaves, and a dusting of snow even on Baldy, the lowest of the Bridger Mountains. The snow was gone by the time I drove south again after completing my errands at PetSmart and Target, for by then the sun had reached the western side of the mountains, the side visible from town, but I knew it still lingered in north-facing crevices.

About two weeks ago Mary Jo Snelling summitted Mt. Cowen, in the Absarokas. Today she flew to a rehabilitation center in Denver specializing in spine and brain injuries, to learn how to live as a paraplegic. Her business partner, my friend Pat, dove at once into the task of trying to preserve Mary Jo's business so that when she returns she’ll find it intact and thriving.

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Bindweed, garden enemy #1

This is the first of several posts on bindweed, scourge of the gardener’s life. I’m hoping to hear from plenty of people about methods and tactics. After all, it all started when a woman in the north-east corner of Montana sent me these pictures of her garden:

Bindweed

Those are bind-weed sprouts there against the bare ground and bindweed climbing the tomatoes. (I think those are tomatoes.) Now take a look at this one:

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