The wonderful world of weeds

Last spring, our first spring here in our new home, we noticed a lot of thistles growing. Nasty things, thistles.

So I started digging them up using a hand weeding tool. It’s laborious on-your-knees work, and it was also an exercise in futility. There were zillions of thistles scattered hither and yon. Trying to lever them out of the ground one by one was impossible. We didn’t want to go around spraying poison, but I can certainly understand why people do.

It wasn’t just thistles. Having now completed an entire growing season, we discovered the horrors of hound’s tongue. Not only does this plant have nasty burrs that take great delight in leaping across the space-time continuum for the simple pleasure of clogging one’s socks or matting a dog’s fur, but the leaves are poisonous to livestock as well. (“Ingestion can cause severe illness and possibly death in horses, swine, and cattle. The alkaloids are potent liver toxins that under some conditions can be carcinogenic…”)

Here’s a close-up of the hound’s tongue nutlets, not yet dried out. Nasty, aren’t they?

So weed control is on our radar.

Last May, rather impulsively, we purchased a four-claw stand-up weed puller made by Fiskars (a brand associated with high-quality scissors). To be honest, I didn’t have a lot of hope for this product, but I was anxious to tackle the thistles, and at $56, it wasn’t going to break the bank.

Their product description seemed ideal for what we needed: “The Fiskars® stand-up weeder makes it easy to permanently remove invasive plants without sore knees from kneeling, back ache from bending or harsh, costly chemical herbicides that need to be applied multiple times. Just place the head over a weed, step down on the reinforced foot platform, and the four serrated, stainless-steel claws will grab the weed by the root for clean removal. An offset hand reduces wrist strain, a viewing window in the pedal makes claw placement mistake-free, and an easy-eject mechanism clears the head between uses for quick and easy cleanup.”

Here’s the foot-pedal and the claws.

You can see how the claws are serrated.

Simply put, the claws grab the plant at the base, and the foot platform levers the plant out by the roots. Sounds simple. But does it work?

Yes. In fact, it works phenomenally well.

Here’s the process. Place the claws over the center of the weed:

Step on the foot pedal to make sure the claws are as far down as they can go:

Then lever back and let the weed puller pull the weed.

Voilà. Notice the taproots? This thistle isn’t growing back.

This is the gizmo to eject the weed from the claws:

Using this tool is actually quite fun, and it’s immensely satisfying (“Die, hound’s tongue, DIE!!“) to pull up a noxious weed and see the long taproot follow.

Here’s some young hound’s tongue:

Moments later, it’s out of the ground.

Here’s another one:

Take a gander at that taproot:

And here’s a nice fat thistle that met its demise. Again, notice the taproot:

It even works on young blackberries. A few vines had sprouted near the base of our porch steps.

On impulse, I tried pulling them up with the weed-puller. And it worked! Look at those roots!

This weed puller has its limitations. Since we purchased it in May of last year, by that point many of the thistles were already too large and/or the ground was too dry to sink the claws into it. For obvious reasons this tool works best in damp soil when the four claws can be centered over the exact middle of the plant (impossible to do when the thistle is already two feet high).

But here in March, with the snow is off the ground and early weeds starting to grow, it is the absolute perfect time to use it.

We’ve started parking the weed puller by the gate on the deck, and grab it whenever we take Mr. Darcy for a walk. As we go, we casually lever out any hound’s tongue or thistle we see. I’ve also started taking solo (meaning, without the dog) excursions onto the steeper wooded parts of our property where the hound’s tongue is more likely to grow. It’s a bit too early in the season yet, but you can bet your bottom dollar I’m going to be vigilant about eradicating this weed from our property.

So there you go. Another tool in our arsenal.