Catchweed Nemesis

ProfessorRoush has briefly referred before to my exasperating experiences with "cleavers", or Galium aparine,also known as "bedstraw", "catchweed", "goosegrass" (geese eat it) and, in a modern twist, "velcro plant".   Some years it grows much faster and thicker than others and this year I almost had two different beds completely consumed by it.  So, once again, the enemy is at my gates and I'm in a wartime footing against this smother-acious pest.

Some may ask about the "catchweed" name, or wonder why I write with such vehemence about it, but if you have ever touched it, you'd know.  This weed-from-Hell attaches itself to anything and everything with the small hooked hairs on its stems and whorled leaves.  It frankly feels "icky" to touch it with bare hands.

Even worse, it has small globular fruits with the same hooks that attach to socks and shirts and underwear and sometimes skin.   I put a closeup to the left, above, and here to the right a wider picture of my T-shirt after one skirmish with the plant.  I'm sure an ecologist would be enthusiastic about the catchweed's utilization of me and every other passing animal to spread seed, but I'm less complementary about that feature, myself.

 Catchweed is an annual with sprawling stems that grow up to 3 feet long and branch and spread along the ground and climb over other plants.  It tries its best to cover and smother neighboring perennials and shrubs while the sadly smothered plant props up the square stems.  And Galium is quite successful in that regard.  In my front bed, for one example, I've got a 6'X8' area where the only recognizable plant is the catchweed on top of everything else.

Since I don't have a pet goose on the premises (nor am I willing to abide the resultant goose droppings that come with one), I've previously recommended pulling catchweed out while wearing cotton gloves as an efficiency measure, but this weekend I found this long-handled cultivator marked down on sale from $7 to $2.50 and I correctly recognized it might be just the nuclear option I was looking for.   My motto is "never use a grenade when an atom bomb is available." 

Anyway, a "picture being worth a thousand words", I'll let the next two photos speak for the efficacy of my inexpensive and effective tool.   Here, at right, I give you a daylily smothered by catchweed.

And a few minutes later, the same daylily from the same angle.   A little hacking-away occurred in the interim, but the cultivator's handle is long enough that I didn't have to bend over, and the catchweed, at least the bulk of it, is gone!  You can see that raking away the "bedstraw" hasn't damaged the underlying daylily (the streaks on the daylily are from hail damage last week!).   Yes, I know I'm not getting the root, but when the Galium grows back, by golly, I'll just do it again.  No seeds for you this year, Catchweed!

Catchweed Annihilation

Occasionally, mundane gardening chores, such as weeding, watering and spraying, impolitely intrude on the more interesting tasks of pruning, deadheading, and the really barn-raising "watching paint dry" feeling Professor gets while waiting on that new rose or peony to flower.  Such chores are easier if one imagines they are on search and destroy missions deeply behind the front lines, engaging and destroying the enemy wherever and whenever found.  While distasteful, the slaying of garden invaders cannot be long-delayed, else a gardener finds oneself overrun and demoralized, and subsequently retreats into the shadows of the house.

My enemy this year seems to be a world-beating crop of Galium aparine, commonly called bedstraw, catchweed or goosegrass, that is spreading like a wildfire on the prairie before a wind.  I tried to ignore it, then placed it on my list of "Things To Get To" rather than confronting the shiny horde, but there came a time when I could no longer turn my head from the onslaught.  I've always seen a little of it around, wisps here or there trying to hide beneath daylilies or consorting with cosmos, but this year it seems to be searching for its own Lebensraum, living space, poking up through every green perennial or shrub in a bid for world domination.

Like many gardeners of my era, when I want to fight back against Mama Nature's most recent attempt to return my garden to an evolutionary laboratory, I hear the wise words of Hannibal Lector to the fledgling Agent Starling in the movie Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkin's voice in my head, quoting Marcus Aurelius, "First principles, Clarice, Simplicity...Of each particular thing, ask What is it in itself? What is its nature?"   With catchweed, its simple nature is to stick; to the plant it seeks to smother, to the gardener, to itself.   ProfessorRoush, ever the aspiring garden Ninja, recognized this year that the destruction of catchweed lies in its own innate velcro-ey nature.  

My weapons; a simple pair of cheap cotton garden gloves.  You'll notice the difference between the right faded and left, newer glove?  Not surprisingly, as a lefty, I wear out several left gloves before the rights, with the result that I have a surplus of decently intact rights and the surviving left gloves are usually full of holes and ready to disintegrate.  But they all still work as allies in catchweed obliteration.  I simply start pulling up a clump, the catchweed grabbing onto the soft glove, and then, keeping the catchweed in my hands, I let the catchweed pick up and tear out its fellow soldiers, massively clumping together in a lemming-like rush to removal. 

It's satisfying watching that stringy, clingy weed disappear from my garden.  I cleared it two weeks ago and I'm only just now seeing a few wisps from stragglers try to stealthily emerge from the shadows.  I find it much less daunting to reach down and pluck out a few stems here and there as I pass by a bed than it is to confront a vast multitude of creeping contagion.  Take it from me, attack your weeding head on, because Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement doesn't work any better in the garden than it did in history.  Better for us, now as before, to follow Churchill's advice, "....to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us...(our aim is) victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be."