Just as the giant pile of dirt clods starts to look like it's shrinking, some sadist comes along and adds another few hundred pounds of dirt to the top of it, and all my hopes are dashed, yet again. This Sisyphean task is crushing my spirit. And it may all be for naught.
Today I learned that we had been using the wrong name for this pest. "Vineweed" sounds very close to correct, but it is actually "bindweed." As in it binds up the gardening and farming implements of destruction used to try to till it out. I will train myself to label my enemy properly in the future. I also learned that it is much more insidious than we knew, and we knew it was pure evil. We had been digging down a couple of feet, thinking there probably weren't roots deeper than that. Au contrâire. They can go five to ten times that deep. And the seeds can lay dormant for decades (multiple decades) before germinating. Egad. What have we gotten into?
There is a small glimmer of hope, however. In all of my internet research, I found a level-headed gardener who offered reasonable advice. He said that the weeds are coming up in areas where the soil conditions are beneficial for them. Most likely the pH is off and the nutrients are out of whack. By taking our soil to be analyzed, and then giving it what it actually needs, we have a chance of growing what we want, and crowding out this nastiness.
Until then, this is the job that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. Some people started digging it, not knowing what it was. And still they keep on digging it forever just because it is the job that never ends... (My apologies to Lamb Chop.)
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