NOW IS THE HOUR

This is the time to thoroughly weed the garden. The soil is soft (not baked summer hard) and, if you weeded last October, weeds should be few. Of course, it is cold and wet out there so I use rubber gloves, not the cotton type.

But every gardener has to face a couple of unpleasant truths. . First, the more fertile your soil, the more abundant the weeds. If you spread manure or compost or fertilizer in your garden beds, your flowers thrive but the weeds also enjoy the pleasant accommodation. This fact alone could make one drop gardening to take up drinking.

Second, the root-spreading weeds have a nasty habit of breaking off at the soil line. This habit evolved in the wild so that the plant root could continue to grow even though the leaves were pulled by a deer or other plant eater. So you cannot yank out most weeds. You have to dig using some sort of long thin tool. I use an old screwdriver and also a special thin trowel.

The late, beloved gardener, Lois Hole, whose books give great advice to Thunder Bay gardeners, had a trick to keep down weeds. Whenever she finished working in one spot, she swept the side of the trowel across the top of the nearby soil, slicing away a thin layer. This discombobulates any tiny weeds that are just starting up.