We should have known the flood was coming: a flood of weeds grew in the garden after our recent drenching rains. Now, mid-September, the forecasts called for more rain over the weekend; the ground was already saturated.
When I created the garden more than ten years ago, I created raised beds, four feet across, with trenches in between each bed. The beds at the bottom of the garden are so close to level that they drain very slowly. In the last few years, as heavy, intermittent rains have become more common, I dug the trenches deeper there to raise the beds about two inches. Now the carrots and turnips were holding in those beds: their leaves still firm and green. No beets were living in the lower portion of their row. In the upper part of the row, some beets were droopy, their leaves yellow; others had turned brown and wilted. They were surrounded by weeds that had grown quickly around them.
A young volunteer came on Saturday morning. The ground was too wet for any kind of power equipment; it was too wet even for hand tools, but the weeds pulled easily by hand. Slogging down trenches filled with water, the clay slippery under our feet, we pulled weeds around those beets.
“”We've got to make sure that the beets are the strongest thing in the bed,” I advised “They are struggling now. To have a chance, they must have sun.” With sun and breeze, the ground would dry; they might make it. With more rain, they were doomed. The small weeds pulled easily in soil that, even soaked, was like fluffy cake. We grabbed them by the handful, carefully pulling those close to the beets. We shook the extra soil off the roots and threw the tops in piles to be collected later.
Soon we went to work on the upper beds. Those beds are nearly perfect: they face southeast and slope gently. We blitzed the weeds in rows of parsnips, kohlrabi, cabbage, onions, radish and zinnias. Soon, my young helper raked up the weeds, forked them into a large green garden cart and hauled one cart after another to the compost pile. He added a thick layer of weeds to the top of each long windrow. He slowed as the work became tedious and heavy. Did we have to collect all the weeds, he asked. World class gardener Alan Chadwick had been adamant: take the weeds to the compost pile before they wilted so that their life force enlivened the pile.
I was yanking the weeds in the zinnias when a hummingbird flew past me. I stopped to watch the small iridescent green sprite of a bird hover in one zinnia blossom after another. “ A humming bird! “ I called excitedly to my young helper. He stopped working and came to see it. “We've tried to get them on our yard for several years, but so far, they haven't come,” he commented
The sun shone; patches of blue appeared in the sky. We surveyed the garden. Gold finches flit to and from rows of sunflowers and amaranth. A flurry of butterflies danced around flowers and herbs. In the sunshine, the butterflies returned in profusion—so many kinds and sizes. My heart opened to such beauty after weeks of dampening weather.
As we finished our work, the young man commented, “ We had a flood of weeds!”
“A flood of water, a flood of weeds and a flood of butterflies,” I answered. “What was your favorite?”
“The butterflies,” he said with an understated smile. We had been awash, at least for a few moments, in butterfly magic. What an unexpected and delightful flood!