Mothers are famous for unappreciated sage advice. My mother is no exception. However, it wasn’t advice on boys or hairdos or hem length I now cherish in retrospect. My mama told me to leave the weeds alone.
Each spring about this time of year when the Easter eggs had all (well, almost all) been collected and the mower was brought out of mothballs, Mama would beg us to mow around the patches of clover and the ajuga and the buttercups and those tiny white flowers with the fuzzy yellow centers. We would make fun of her and her sentimental objections to pulverizing sweet little wildflowers.
Well, who’s got the last laugh now? If we had listened to Mama, if America had listened to Mama, our pollinators would be in better shape now. But we had to have our respectable lawns and perfectly mown grass and the pretty flowers had to lose their heads. I don’t believe my mother actually had a premonition about colony collapse disorder, but she had the right idea anyway. The current consensus points to inadequacies in the bees’ food supply as one of the contributing factors to the problem.
Now I heed my mother’s advice and leave the weeds alone. Not all of them, but I have a backyard full of clover that’s here to stay. I’m leaving a patch of blooming turnip greens the bees love (top photo) and there are flower seeds to sow for the summer. I still keep the front lawn mowed because I am only a closet nonconformist (and the city will kindly cut it for me at my expense if it exceeds 6 inches).
I bet you leave a little something for the bees, too, don’t you? Renegades.
Enjoying the clover–she thinks it’s just for her.
T.L.
Damned cities and their freaking bylaws, totally anti-survival, very conforming and sick! We must invade the councils and change the laws relax them allow goats, chickens, let lawns grow naturally, We must stop mimicking 18th century British Lords and Ladies, Lawns, flower gardens, and “Crappier” toilets must go! In a world of space travel, we still sit and shiite on the worst water-polluter ever designed! Sweden has composting toilets – most humanure is bio-gassable! but Yankee Doodle sits and shiites, and wastes trees in place of hemp-paper to wipe his brown-spot, all the time, worried about 2012, and the end of the age! goddamned dumb-ass if you ask me! Piss in a bucket, and pour it on your survival garden you fool, the Uber-Rich are still hungry and are coming to rape you again, rest assured! The dollar is falling like a stone on world markets now, after the Uber-Rich have hidden their own fortunes in the ever-so -stable “Yuan” on the Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong stock markets! Obama Dod Not get the Trillions he wanted from China! The question to ask is Why did he need them in the first place? and What happens without them? Is this the habinger of the next great republican depression? Are we not able to buy our way out of the next down cycle? Be prepared for it, the next down-cycle is as inevitable as all the preceding ones! Grow a garden do aquaponics, raise chickens, get that garden going, compost, and remember: The “Dirty Thirties ” really happened in America, not in the movies!
Uncle B–We’ve got to do something. But if you can get Americans to give up their toilets you’re a miracle worker.