Unseasonal Greetings

The Swiss Chard is still growing

The weather has been in the 60's for the last several days. That means there are no excuses for not going out and working in the garden -- harvesting some Swiss chard, surveying the newly sprouted weeds and feeling guilty about the garden tasks that never got finished or even begun (the latter is the subject for another, very long blog post).

I was incredulous that so many new weeds would have sprouted up at the end of November. Don't things die back for the winter in these parts?

Daffodils are already
starting to come up

While I was futilely trying to lessen the spread of the budding new weeds, I found something else I didn't expect until spring: daffodil tips pushing up from the earth.

Cherry blossoms at Thanksgiving.
A sign of global warming?

That was just too much. So I took my dog for a walk to clear my head. And what did I see? Cherry blossoms on the tree in someone's front yard.

Dirty Hairy

The weed that is carpeting every bald spot in the lawn and every uncovered area in the garden is called Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta). It's a member of the Brassicaseae family (like cabbages and mustard) and is an edible bitter green. Guess what we're having in our salads from now on? We have plenty. It sprouts up in the autumn and stays green throughout the winter. And it can't be composted because it will continue to grow seeds after it's pulled up. The most important way to control it is to not let it flower and seed.

Hairy bittercress.
 But a better name is "Cluster bomb"

It's classified as an invasive weed because of its diabolical reproductive system. The plant is an angiosperm. Which means its flowers produce fruits with seeds that include a nutrient that aids in their germination (like wheat, barley, corn and coconuts). Its other common names are "jumping jesus" and "popping cress" because the fruits burst open at the slightest disturbance and scatter thousands of seeds. I called them "cluster bombs" last Spring for the way they blasted into my shins and face when I was trying to pull them up. The zillions of scattered seeds can then germinate for years

I didn't know how lucky I was in Colorado that Hairy bittercress doesn't grow there. At least it's almost fun to pinch the center of the carycomb of leaves and pull them out of our luscious loamy New Jersey soil. I'm sorry to say, there really is too much of a good thing.