Garlic Mustard Cleansing

When I close my eyes, I can still see the plants, the little white flowers. Too small (luckily) to be table/vase pretty, but delicate and simple. Yet it's a plague upon the land, a destroyer of our native life, a threat to our very heritage. It must be killed, eradicated, the very roots pulled out and the bodies burned ... okay, maybe 4 hours in the sun will exaggerate certain aspects of a job.This is a thought that has occurred more than once, while cutting the grass (w/ the push mower - slow, but ineffective (you end up covering the lawn about 3 times) like a bad haircut w/ a butter knife ... quiet though) w/ the weed puller in my pocket. You spot yet another skunk weed patch or humoungous dandelion and stop to dig it out, striving for a vegative racial purity. Next door they apply chemicals, across the street they hire a gang of brownshirts in a white van, thugs to drop by and convince the weedy, unwanted - alien plants to go elsewhere, carrying the pile of carcasses off in black plastic bags. Still, the tide remains unturned, unstoppable; there's more of them and they just won't stop reproducing! Sure that yellow flower, the purest butter yellow is lovely but 3 days later the seeds are launched like a parachute platoon, an attack of spider-like insurgents that'll be killing grass w/i a month (okay 8-15 weeks) One *inch* of root will regenerate a new plant (Not "Alien", but The Blob maybe). Your 'rooting tool' is no match for that sort of fecundicity. Burdock, the vaguely rhubarb looking thing grow these preposterous roots and, again, if you don't get it all - back it comes. Thistles, creeping Charlie, mint, violets ....

And then there's garlic mustard. Last year, must of removed 8 bags of the stuff (on to the curb for the special trucks - something like "Bring out your dead" cart or the "Soylent Green" dumpsters) from the back yard and this year - its all back. 1000s of plants draped across the landscape like, er, a rug. New infestations by the mailbox, under the lilac bush and all along the fence line. Not to mention the other side of the fence, where my neighbor's yard is infested. I'll have to cleanse that area too, an invasion (by me) and pogrom or else the damn things'll be back in my yard like ... you know, one of those hordes. Hey, there are no pacifists in the garden, you're out there eradicating intruders by pulling their little bodies right out by the root (and, w/ luck, including the roots) and the sun, the heat and sweat and ants and those little tank-like bugs under the rotting wood and your back aches and fingers sore from unaccustomed activity and the hand w/ the rooting thingee is cramping and you look up and there another 1000 of them under the pine trees, the little 2 leaf starters and the 6 inch kids sprouting the little white soon to be a million more indestructable seed (5 years they'll wait and you can't even burn them sterile) flowers popping and taller rows intertwined w/ the lillys and "aaaaaahhhghh!" "You win," I want to say, "you win, take the yard, take the shade, take the native foliage, just leave me alone!"

Thankfully, a beer and a bottle of water and one can start again. Tomorrow.