The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I have made a terrible mistake! I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, it seemed unlikely to me too. But it’s true, I’ve screwed up Big Time, one of those mistakes you may have to regret the rest of your sorry miserable life.

We have a woods in back, about 5 acres, which when we bought the place was completely covered in old growth nettles that grew to seven, even eight feet tall. Impenetrable jungle of the stinging beasts we had to beat a trail into just to get into our own woods. But one year I noticed that these little delicate bleeding heart plants had established their puny selves in and among those giant stinging nettles and seemed to supplant their network of roots. So for years I have been planting the bleeding hearts along the trail along with some myrtle starts, periwinkle maybe you call them, and over time they not only lined our trail, they spread into the woods. It was wonderful.

A few years back I decided, despite reading about the impossibility of eliminating my nettles, to attempt to do just that, kill the buggers. The first year I sickled them down, about three acres of them, and I noticed that the following year the new nettles were greatly diminished. Heartened, I whacked all five acres and I’ve been doing it now for three years. You walk back in our woods, you don’t see many nettles anymore and now trees we’ve planted have a chance to grow whereas before they died a sunless death under the nettle canopy. It’s almost a park back there.

But … awhile back I planted a little variegated vine, a lamium, commonly called the Yellow Archangel. It has a relative, you might be interested, called Dead Nettle. Dead Nettle, now, you know I’m going to bite on that. So I stuck a sprig here, a clump there and figured it would be a colorful addition to the bleeding hearts and the periwinkle. It was. For the first couple of years. But then it started to run. Then it galloped. And this year it went into warp drive, covering up the bleeding hearts, the myrtle, the ferns, dead logs, stray children, anything in its ravenous way. It is the kudzu of the north, invasive as Trump’s Syrian terrorists, and rapidly on its way to covering our entire woods. It is a nightmare. It is a scourge. It is a total mistake and now I have to try to correct it. To save not just my woods and the South End, but quite possibly the world.

I have begun whacking them. I have mowed them. I am now weedeating the jungle monsters. I have about half an acre to an acre of these creeping beasts and my theory is that if they never see daylight, like the nettles, their roots, I don’t care how many hundreds of miles of pulpy tendrils, they’ll die. You should wish me luck because your fate depends on me. If I fail, I am so so sorry. I plead benign ignorance even though I know that won’t help in the end. And yeah, I know, ignorance isn’t bliss.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2016 at 3:37 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.