Last summer, planning to extend a flower garden, I covered a weed-choked area of about 4 feet by 10 feet with a foot high pile of dense lawn clippings. The plan was to kill the sod by excluding the light of the sun. It's an effective, proven method -- most people use black plastic for the same purpose. What sort of weed was I combating? The population endemic to this part of Vermont: a mixed stand of goldenrod, milkweed, plantain, dandelion, blackberry, bindweed, dogbane, Indian paint-brush, buttercup, bracken fern. Yesterday I inspected the results. The sod is dead, but it's been replaced by a nearly pure stand of witch grass, which not not only survived but prospered. Every other plant was door nail dead. I spent the day pulling up and digging out forty square feet of tenacious witch grass.
Witch grass is the most noxious of the weeds with which I daily contend. It's invasive, almost indestructible, powerful. If you dig it out and leave behind the merest shred of root (underground stem, actually), the plant immediately regenerates. It finds its way through wooden barriers and under metal barriers. It grows rapidly in almost all soils.
Witch grass has forced me to stop growing bearded iris. It so surrounds and overwhelms the irises that they can't be weeded without dislodging the shallow corms. I've occasionally dug up an iris where the witch grass didn't even bother to go around the corm -- just dug a hole and bored right through it. On the other hand, Siberian irises compete well with witch grass. Siberians make such a dense deep cluster of roots that they squeeze the witch grass to death. Strangles it. Does my heart good.
There's some pleasure in weeding witch grass, especially when you can get a good grab and drag out a long root. In good soil, after a rain, I've pulled out pieces three or four feet long. But you have to dispose of it properly. It takes the sun a week to kill the root, and should you accidentally cover it with other weeds, it will come to life even even though it's not even under the ground.
I used to say that I wanted my gravestone to read: "He got the witch grass out of his garden." But now I know that it was mere vanity to think that I could win the battle of the witch grass. Here's a prediction: there will come a day when witch grass will grow over and under and around my marble marker.
Witch grass (agropyron repens) is not even native to the New World. It's come to us from Europe. Along with the dandelion, the starling and Dutch elm disease.
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