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05/01/2011: "Nemesis!"

It's been a wet spring again. I saw an article in the Oregonian that claimed that supposedly this was the third wettest April on record (in that regard it probably compares favorably to last year, when it rained so much that my drainage trenches filled up to the brim - two feet deep). The combination of wet ground and late season has made for some lush weed growth in some areas of the farm. I set out to plant some perennials earlier last month, and noticed that poison hemlock was bunching up around my previously planted grapes. I looked at them - and something snapped. Self, I said to myself, this year I'm taking a stand on the poison hemlock. Curious, I knelt down and grabbed one of the hemlock plants and pulled it. To my surprise, it came out easily, with a fairly complete tap root! Well, well, well. I got to work.



There's always been some sort of hemlock stand in the area north of the cow shed. Most years I try to get back there with a mower, and knock it down before it goes to seed, but I'm not always successful in timing it. I was definitely late mowing it last year, and the plants were man-high by the time I got to them. They probably had viable seeds on the stalks, too, for this year there is an incredible crop of small hemlock plants. Hundreds of plants. If you look at the picture above you'll see the path of devastation I wrought on that first day as I just waded into the patch on my hands and knees, pulling everything in sight like some demented, weed-killin' baby.

There's also a stand that had a pretty strong foothold in the south yard. However, the drainage project trenching, followed by the tilling that we did to level it out, knocked it down quite a bit. On my second trip of eradication I pretty well cleared out the south yard.

Last Friday I was back at it. There was still quite a bit of it near the cowshed, and I just kept cruising, pull, toss, pull. I got down the last ten by twenty foot patch, maybe an hour's work, when I just ran out of steam. It was time to head home after a long afternoon in the weed patch. Here is one of my piles of poison hemlock:



That pile is about five feet in diameter, and about two and half feet tall... and it is one of about four such piles I made that day! Some of the plants had tap roots eighteen inches long (see photo at the head of this posting for an example).

I was feeling pretty good about myself, feeling like i was beating back the weeds and winning, for once. Before I left, however, I took a walk down to the pasture to check on the new grass down there. What I found shocked and dismayed me: there's a huge number of Canada thistle plants down in the new grass! They're all growing in neat little rows, like some sort of hideous miniature Christmas tree farm; they sprang up in the soil that was disturbed by the tiller prior to the grass seed planting.



Well, they say that when you fix your number one problem, number two gets a promotion. Dang, though; there's the better part of an acre that is going to go to thistle if I don't do something fast.