Weed Seeds

It's a personal thing, being that close with your field. Wading around the in soft, velvety, green waves of the barley field. I always thought those velvet waves looked a little like ocean waves, thinking that was the closest to the ocean I’d ever get. I have seen the ocean now, but this midwestern girl still prefers her amber waves of grain and all the colors it is before it gets to the amber color of a mature field. There is nothing that aggravates my eyes more than a perfect field obscured by pesky mustard, or worse still by a storm that lodges patches of the field leaving depressions where there should be glorious waves.

What makes a weed a weed is just that it is a plant that is growing where it isn’t wanted. Heck, grass can even be a weed if it is out in the corn field. For some, weeds are any broadleaf growing in their precious lawn, and for others it is mustard growing in the barley field. Mustard is an age old invasive species. I read once that it spreads so rapidly because even if you pull it and throw it aside, it will still produce mature seeds free to make tons of new plants. If I happen to drive by a field that has mustard in it, I have to fight off the urge to pull over, find a gunny sack, and pull it all out. In a Round-up ready world, not many folks think about invasive plants and their effects on old time farms and farm families, but I do.

I mentioned in previous post that we plant mostly open pollinated varieties of barley and corn. We managed our weeds by luck, an only child pulling mustard by hand, and cultivating. Folks raised a few generations back might recall being paid a pittance for pulling mustard from farm fields. I don’t ever recall being paid, it was just my duty as a participant in our farm process to do so. 

Not every year is a bad year for mustard. We’ve never had much of it before, but this year the low end of the neighbors corn field is full of it. Every time I see it, I am put back to a time when I was sent to the barley field with a feed sack and set to pulling the pesky plant. Mustard left unchecked will take over a field if you let it, or so I’ve been told. The mustard in our barley field was never given the chance. Systematically, I’d work my way though the field. What looked like a plant here and there was usually a patch of twenty plants when I got up close. Plant by plant I’d pull each one up by the roots and put it in the sack, my hands getting sore with the work and the little slivers the plant sometimes left behind. 

Beauty and Roy on the Cultivator with Riley
running along to supervise

If there was mustard in the corn field, we pulled that too. The rest of the weeds were controlled by the cultivator, another horse drawn contraption ingeniously designed for the job. The cultivator had two wheels and, as the team pulled it along the row, the driver could shimmy the wheels and teeth from side to side to avoid knocking over any corn. The team walked down the field in a mostly straight line with Pa and the seat zigging and zagging along ever so slightly that if you didn’t know what to look for you’d miss it completely. The results were two perfectly hoed rows with a row of perfect standing corn in the middle. 

One year Pa let me try it. Twelve feet of up-rooted baby corn plants established that Pa made it look far easier than it actually was. “Let’s try this” he said thoughtfully stroking his beard, and this time around Pa drove and I ran the cultivator… This too was much harder than Pa made it seem. It did work ok when I drove and Pa worked the cultivator, but there is little sense in have two people do one person’s work, so I turned the reins back over after a short while. I then took up the task of replanting the two rows of demolished baby corn plants and haven’t driven the cultivator since. I can drive a team okay on a wagon, but these finer things I am not practiced or experienced enough to do with ease. 

Beauty and Roy on the Cultivator

Pa might cultivate two or three times before the leaves close in and choke the weeds with lack of sunlight. In the old times farmers might plant pumpkins or squash among the corn to keep the weeds down and seal in moisture since corn leaves so much soil bare. The resulting abundance of pumpkins would be fed to livestock. Indigenous people did this too, adding beans to the mix. The three sisters, squash, beans, and corn, provide many benefits to the soil, crops, and to the farmers too. I’m sure Indigenous people didn’t spend too much time on the science of horticulture with its nitrogen fixation and moisture retention, but they were very wise in their farming practices, which is why farmers were still doing similar things into the twentieth century.

I always wanted to plant pumpkins in the corn field. Perhaps someday I will. In the meantime, I will carry on pulling garlic mustard and pondering the many weeds that grace our lives, some invasive and some just an annoyance. Weed seeds are the reminder to a farmer that we are not really in charge here despite what we might think. Weed seeds will always be one step ahead of us. They do their best to keep us humble, and remind us that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves.