12 • ZUCCHINI LARCENY
JulyThe president succumbed to weeds. So did the lost dogs, the want ads,
and our county’s Miss America hopeful. By the time we returned from
vacation at the end of June, our fastidious layers of newspaper mulch
were melting into the topsoil. The formerly clean rows between our crops
were now smudged everywhere with a hoary green fi ve o’clock shadow.
Weeds crowded the necks of the young eggplants and leaned onto the
rows of beans. Weeds are job security for the gardener.
Pigweeds, pokeweeds, quackgrass, crabgrass, purslane: we waged war,
hoeing and yanking them up until weeds began to twine through our
dreams. We steamed and ate some of the purslane. It’s not bad. And, we
reasoned (with logic typical of those who strategize wars), identifying it as
an edible noncombatant helped make it look like we might be winning.
Weed is, after all, an arbitrary designation—a plant growing where you
don’t want it. But tasty or not, most of the purslane still had to come out.
The agricultural concern with weeds is not aesthetic but functional.
Weedy species specialize in disturbed (i.e. newly tilled) soil, and grow so
fast they kill the crops if allowed to stay, first through root competition
and then by shading.
Conventional farming uses herbicidal chemicals for weed control, but
since organic growers don’t, it is weeds—even more than insects—that
often present the most costly and troublesome challenge. In large opera-