Weeding Puzzles

Weather: It’s not warm enough until about 9 am for the hoses to run; by the time it’s comfortably warm around 11 am, the winds have started.

Last usable rain: 3/18. Week’s low: 24 degrees F. Week’s high: 77 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming: Bradford pears, apricots, peaches, purple leafed plums, forsythia, tulips, daffodils, vinca, alfilerillo, tansy and purple mustards, dandelions

What’s emerging: Sweet and choke cherries, spirea, snowball, white sweet clover, catmints, Saint John’s wort, pigweed, Silver King artemisia, Shasta daisies, buffalo and needle grasses

Tasks: Ditches are running

Animal sightings: Rabbit, chickadees, and other small birds, bumble and small bees; hornets and sidewalk ants hatched on Thursday. Quail are constantly on the back porch. Other loud birds, crows or hawks flying around.

I replaced a hose that had been eaten by the ground squirrel on Tuesday, and two days later the replacement also was destroyed. Thursday, I saw it run from the steps into my house toward my neighbor’s yard where it lives.

Monarch butterflies arrived Saturday. Last year they came when the sand cherries were blooming. This year all that’s available is the peach and purple-leaf plum. By noon, when the bees arrive, the peach is a very busy place.

Weekly update: I spend about two hours a day outside, when the weather is good. That leaves a hole in my schedule in the winter that I fill with jigsaw puzzles.

I thought about the connection between puzzles and weeding this week when I was cleaning out the dead garlic chive stems I had mowed down with the string trimmer. I wondered why I never remembered the characteristics of plants, like whether to cut or break the stems.

That was when I thought about the puzzles. There are many ways to put one together. My mother would always do the border first, then work from the sky down to the bottom.

I’m so near sighted I can only work a small section at a time. I pick through the pieces looking for the ones I think go in a certain area, using the pictorial fragments as a guide. This week it was two red windmills in the mid ground.

What I do after the middle varies from puzzle to puzzle. As I pick though the pieces I recognize patterns that determine the strategy for continuing. This time I did the water line through the center, then the green below, and next the mountain. Then, I could break the sky into the area with clouds and without. That left the hydrangeas. By this time I recognized different sections of the flowers, and was able to break it into smaller areas.

When I weeding, I follow some general rules. I have to remove enough stuff so I can see what’s below. When I was cleaning some roses last week, that meant mowing down the alfalfa and June grass that were growing on the perimeter.

The other general rule is working from the outside in. Before I could do the drive side of the roses, I had to rake out stems and leaves to clear myself a path. That actually took more time than working on the canes.

These routines are like the way I begin a puzzle.

Once I’m able to seriously clean an area, the methods reinvent themselves. I don’t have to remember the traits of each plant. The process of clearing a way to them reeducates me the way sorting through the pieces of a puzzle guides me.

Both are problem solving in which the strategy is what’s remembered, not the details.

Notes on photographs: All taken 5 April 2020.
1. The cottonwood continues to drop stems. I suspect that were cut off when the man was working from the crane, but got caught by other stems during their fall.

2. I sometimes wonder if I’m imagining the ground squirrel is destroying my hoses. There was no doubt with this one.

3. The sprinkler under the cottonwood was destroyed. I suspect some large limb fell on it. There’s a reason logging can be so dangerous. A hard hat wouldn’t have provided much protection.