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How Does My Garden Grow?
Jun. 17th, 2004 05:38 pmI never fully appreciated the insidiousness and tenacity implied in the phrase 'grass roots organization' until I started weeding my own garden.
Grass looks so simple and transient, from the surface. It's only one tiny blade a few inches long, with a skinny, weak-looking stem - bigger, hardier plants have fragile little root balls, so grass must have such a tiny, threadlike, abbreviated root that it should be no trouble at all to pull it up, right? Listening to the wind blowing across the lawn outside my window, I can almost hear the grass laughing at me.
I grasped the first handful of blades in my hand, and gave a gentle tug - and they all snapped off about a millimeter above the dirt. I skibbled around in the earth for a few minutes, knowing that I had just doomed myself to regrowth and grinding dirt into my nails deeper than I would have thought possible, but I couldn't dig the roots out enough to get anything resembling a stable grip. So I sighed, and strove to pull the grass up one blade at a time. Because I have nothing better to do with my day, of course.
Next attempt, one blade firmly between my fingers just as it emerges from the ground. I pulled as slowly and gently as I could, and was rewarded with a root thicker than some cables I've seen, approximately as tough and tenacious as leather cord. And I pulled. And I pulled. I pulled across the entire width of my garden, eventually ending at another single blade of grass at the opposite end of the zucchini patch. Eight feet of root, for two single inch-and-a-half blades of grass. At that point, I admitted defeat and settled down to pull up the other weeds, leaving the grassy bits for my sweetie and his sharp gardening implement. From now on, I do believe that 'grassy' will be the highest compliment I can pay to a formidable enemy....
Grass looks so simple and transient, from the surface. It's only one tiny blade a few inches long, with a skinny, weak-looking stem - bigger, hardier plants have fragile little root balls, so grass must have such a tiny, threadlike, abbreviated root that it should be no trouble at all to pull it up, right? Listening to the wind blowing across the lawn outside my window, I can almost hear the grass laughing at me.
I grasped the first handful of blades in my hand, and gave a gentle tug - and they all snapped off about a millimeter above the dirt. I skibbled around in the earth for a few minutes, knowing that I had just doomed myself to regrowth and grinding dirt into my nails deeper than I would have thought possible, but I couldn't dig the roots out enough to get anything resembling a stable grip. So I sighed, and strove to pull the grass up one blade at a time. Because I have nothing better to do with my day, of course.
Next attempt, one blade firmly between my fingers just as it emerges from the ground. I pulled as slowly and gently as I could, and was rewarded with a root thicker than some cables I've seen, approximately as tough and tenacious as leather cord. And I pulled. And I pulled. I pulled across the entire width of my garden, eventually ending at another single blade of grass at the opposite end of the zucchini patch. Eight feet of root, for two single inch-and-a-half blades of grass. At that point, I admitted defeat and settled down to pull up the other weeds, leaving the grassy bits for my sweetie and his sharp gardening implement. From now on, I do believe that 'grassy' will be the highest compliment I can pay to a formidable enemy....
