It’s been great to be outdoors over the past several weeks.  It’s been sunny for the most part and the temperatures have been pleasant.  I particularly enjoy watching the flowers bloom and trees and shrubs leaf out.  For better or worse though, spring brings weeds as well as flowers.  We’re got two nasty ones in abundance in this area:  garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) and Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica).  The problem with them is that they crowd out native plants.  They colonize areas and don’t provide the foliage, pollen, nectar, fruits, seeds, etc. that wildlife would otherwise get from native species.

This is garlic mustard:

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This is Japanese knotweed early in the season

and later on in the season (maybe July or August?):

We haven’t had knotweed in the yard but get plenty of garlic mustard.  I’ve been killing it on sight – either digging it up or soaking it with Round-Up.  (There aren’t too many things I hit with Round-Up.  Garlic mustard and Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica*) are two.)  There’s another option however.  I learned yesterday that both garlic mustard and knotweed shoots are edible.  Look here for recipes.  Young knotweed shoots are apparently similar to rhubarb.  I’m not anticipating either on the menu here at home but if you try them I’d be interested to hear how they turn out.

All that is a very long segue to a note about a weed I discovered in the yard last year, Japanese hops (Humulus japonicus).  It’s an interesting looking vine that I hadn’t seen before.  Here’s a picture of a mature plant:

While it is part of the hops family, it is “not suitable for brewing as the female cones lack lupulin, the oily resin that gives brewing hops its distinct taste and aroma.”   (And, in case you were wondering, it is also a member of the cannabis family.)  Anyhow, I noticed one last year and didn’t know what it was.  Ever the experimentalist, I let it grow until it was big enough that I could identify it – whereupon I immediately dug it out.  Unfortunately, I was a bit too late, i.e., I apparently dug it up after it had gone to seed as I’ve found well over half a dozen seedlings in the yard this spring.  Not a real big deal but the lesson learned is that it’s best to identify weeds early and dig them up ASAP to save yourself work in the future.

That brings me to tools.  I’ve been using a trapezoid hoe for weeding.  I haven’t fallen in love with it as I did my soil knife – I may never love another tool as much as that soil knife – but it’s doing a nice job with the young weeds.

On to rocks.  I need to plant to some field stones to help retain a sloped area in the yard.  I hadn’t fully appreciated that field stones are a limited resource.  I’ve used all the ones I’ve found in the yard elsewhere and the local garden center gets $250 for roughly 1 cubic yard of them.  I looked around and that’s actually the lowest price I could find.   Just an FYI.

Happy gardening!

* Native honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) is lovely.  I plan to plant some this spring and let it grow up over a trellis.  In contrast, Japanese honeysuckle is a noxious weed.