Weeds are a theme for the week.

We had a wonderful class here last night on the value of weeds for medicinal purposes. My friend Nicole opened our minds to the amazing properties of these garden pests we are in the habit of cursing. Stinging nettle is a high-protien, vitamin-and-mineral rich detoxifier that is great for allergies, herpes, arthritis and shiny thick hair. Plantain is an anti-microbial, wound-healing wonder worker when chewed up and applied with your spit to bee stings, puffy veins, hemorrhoids and diaper rash. Chickweed is a cooling nutritious green useful for weight loss, inflammation, fevers, rashes, sore throats and stressed lungs. We had a delicious chickweed pesto for a snack! Burdock roots, which are apparently also tasty, stabilize blood sugar, clear the skin and can strengthen the immune system in urinary problems, HIV, cancer and chronic fatigue. Dandelion strengthens the liver and kidneys and lowers cholesterol and blood pressure. We enjoyed a wonderful dandelion wine at the close of the class and toasted the green pharmacy in our backyards! Then we begged Nicole to come back and teach us more. Which she promised to do, so watch the site for more info about that…

While I’ve learned a great deal about the value of these rampant weeds, it doesn’t make it any easier to clear them from my garden spaces so that I can give the vegetable crops room to grow. (Not to worry, I’ll still have plenty of weeds left elsewhere when the plots are clear!) The prospect of clearing earth is always daunting in this season of exuberant growth. Actually, it’s always pretty daunting. Though we grow 100% organically, Spring always makes me judge conventional herbicide-based agriculture a bit less, because there is only so much one can endure at the back end of a hoe! The size of my produce business is definitely limited by the health of my back, the backs of those who labor along side me, and the amount of ingenuity we can apply toward the problem of holding the weeds at bay.

Owning the right hoes (and other equipment like rototillers, tractors and pigs) is essential and I’ve started buying mine from my Hmong friends, who are absolute experts in the art of hand cultivation. Because I prefer quiet and light methods of cultivation, as opposed to tractor farming which certainly has a mechanical elegance of its own, I find few things as mesmerizing and awe-inspiring as a crew of Hmong grandmas leading their kids and grandkids weeding across a field, leaving newly-liberated vegetables standing proudly in their wake. I’ve learned so much from watching, working with and talking to these highly skilled farmers. I think I’m getting better at handling the tools and understanding the weeds and as a result the work is easier on my body.

Skills such as these are definitely a lost art in our culture. I’m sure they are lost to most modern cultures, which is a great shame because I think the impulse to cultivate is a deeply-rooted human characteristic. There is something so basic and meditative and ultimately empowering in the rhythm and focus and steadily revealed progress of weeding by hand. But, gosh, is it hard work!

Ironically this morning, just as I contemplate the cusp of the cultivation season here on the farm, I found this old article I’d clipped some years ago out of a Real Simple magazine. It looks from the ripped remnants of articles around the edge of this one that the feature was Father’s Day and this writer had honored her father with this memory:

“Growing up, my four sisters and I occasionally let our tempers flare. Once, my father walked into the house as insults were being thrown. He took us outside to the planting beds and had us weed, explaining that in life you sometimes had to weed out the frustrations and impulses of hateful words and actions. When I was a child, this concrete example made sense to me. To this day, when I weed my garden, I think about that: and when I get frustrated, as I still tend to do, I try to remind myself to just go weed.”

Janelle Sowders, Cincinnati, Ohio

Recently I was talking to my dad on the cellphone while surveying a particularly insidious take-over of my Brussels sprout patch by pigweed (also known as amaranth, which has some pretty excellent nutritional and medicinal properties of its own – it’s astringent and stops both diarrhea and hemorrhaging). I was despairing of getting it cleared and contemplating putting the pigs into the plot and giving up on the sprouts.

“Well,” he said slowly, “There is something really good about drudgery.” And he’s right. My thoughts are never so free as when I yield myself to an afternoon of hoeing, and I generally find my mind is as clear as the rows when it’s over. I breath in, I breath out, I feel my shoulders and my glutes. I rest, I look around, I notice things. I solve problems, I let resentments go, I access a deep well of thankfulness underneath my busy-ness. I did weed that plot and eventually harvested a hundred stalks of fabulous Brussels sprouts a few months later.

Of course, I know that weeds aren’t all bad. They have their place, and the domesticated plants have theirs. And I have mine, which is the task of keeping them separate.