AS WE NOW enter September, with its heavy dew on the lawn and yard, pestilence once again begins to raise its destructive head.
Slugs will soon try to overrun your beautiful flowers and vegetables, so please be on the lookout for them.
The mice and voles will be looking to become fat for the winter and the dew will increase, giving mold a foothold, so please deadhead and remove old, dying foliage on your beautiful botanicals.
And playing off Labor Day a bit, let’s take up the subject of a highly reproductive weed whose mission is to shoot forth its progeny at an alarming amount and distance all over your garden, causing you much grief.
The question as to the identity of this weed has come to me several times this past week.
There’s no question it’s time to discuss this menace yet again. The botanical name of this offensive seed pod that explodes tiny white flowers is Cardamine hirsuta, or C oligosperma.
Much more accurate and descriptive common names are shot weed, artillery weed, pop-in-the-eye weed, snap weed and spitweed — I call it “blunderbuss weed” — but it is more commonly known as hairy bittercress.
This little weed has long, exploding seed pods that spread over your entire garden and landscape.
Hitchhikes to home
It is what we in the industry call a greenhouse weed. It is commonly found in greenhouses and, through transport and delivery, it has been shipped by nurseries and greenhouses throughout the country.
This, of course, includes your house, and you most likely paid someone for the plants you brought home with it.
Bittercress is in the mustard family and is a brassicaceae, meaning that, like its cousins broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and such, it flourishes here on the North Olympic Peninsula.
It grows flowers and hurls its seeds throughout the year.
In fact, that is part of the perplexing problem of this weed.
Firing in all directions
It is a winter-through-to-next-fall flowering weed. It loves our climate, which is why its growing season is all year long.
One touch to its mature seed pods (silques) sends seeds firing off in all directions (which is why I like my term “blunderbuss weed”).
This weed adores recently disturbed soil (think tilling, planting, cultivating and hoeing). It also is an edible and nutritious green, but with a bitter taste.
How do you control this weed? While making a salad of it may be one way to get revenge, the answer, of course, is weed, baby, weed, then weed some more.
Absolutely hunt it down and pull or hoe it regularly.
It pulls out incredibly easy. You must eradicate it before its little white flowers are present.
If numerous small plants or seedlings are present, then a great trick is to smother them.
Bittercress is very lush and succulent, so it has little ability to grow out of a covering of new soil or mulch.
Cover up the weeds with an inch or two of good topsoil or mulch.
Take care of this weed every week or two because, even on Labor Day, this is definitely one pregnant lady we don’t want around and it will take a lot of labor to work this plant out of your yard.
And please … work on staying well.
________
Andrew May is a freelance writer and ornamental horticulturist who dreams of having Clallam and Jefferson counties nationally recognized as “Flower Peninsula USA.” Send him questions c/o Peninsula Daily News, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or email news@peninsuladailynews.com (subject line: Andrew May).
