Going away on vacation is one of the pleasures of summer and should be savored by those who are able to take time away from the day-to-day routine. Of course, it also means leaving your garden behind. Unless you are wealthy and have someone to tend the beds, borders and containers while you are away, you will be faced with a “situation” when you get home.
Weeds, no matter how primitive, seem have an instinct that alerts them when the gardener is away, sick, or not paying attention. The instinct triggers a growth hormone that makes them grow twice as fast as they normally would. Since it is summer, the dominant weeds in my planting scheme are stiltgrass and crabgrass.
Stiltgrass, sometimes called “Japanese stiltgrass,” came, not surprisingly, from Japan, and has been on these shores for well over a century. Somewhat similar in appearance to young bamboo, it grows between one and three feet tall, bearing lance-shaped leaves. Like the more familiar crabgrass, it can easily form mats, and will roam rapaciously over garden beds and through lawns. It grows fast when you are at home and even faster when you are on vacation. When I returned from eleven days away, I found mats of vigorous stiltgrass throughout the garden growing in the strip between the sidewalk and the street. It snuck in between long iris leaves and insinuated itself into a stand of catmint. It has taken a major effort to remove it and I am still not sure it is completely gone.
Crabgrass grows even in the sidewalk cracks, spreading its tentacles as widely as possible. The sight of it makes me want to arm myself with a flamethrower to get rid of it.
Fortunately, my ineptness with dangerous equipment like flamethrowers makes me hesitant to go on Amazon and order one. Besides, if I accidentally burned down my house while using the flamethrower, the crabgrass would start regrowing before the firefighters got back to the station.
Beyond the weeds, the garden got unkept and shaggy looking in my absence. The same landscape that looked trim and tidy for the local garden tour in early June looked—charitably—like an exercise in rewilding after vacation. Since I also mow my own lawn and trim my own shrubs, the whole place had a sad appearance.
If you find yourself in a similar position the best thing to own is power tools. An electric lawnmower, electric hedge trimmer and an electric string trimmer will get the worst of the mess under control. I used to be a purist about hand tools, but common sense has prevailed. The garden fork and hand cultivator have been in heavy use on the crabgrass and stilt grass.
The real problem is that all that post-vacation clean-up takes time, and anyone who has ever been employed knows that the only time busier than the week before vacation is the week after vacation. It was hard for me to spend quality time with the electric string trimmer when I was spending so many daylight hours dealing with meetings, the bursting in-box, and the backlog of work that wasn’t quite finished when I left town.
Even if legislators decide to bestow perpetual daylight savings time on us all, we still won’t have 26 hours in a day. This is a problem when the garden is in extremis. I work to resolve the conflict between the business of life and the business of my garden by working in small time increments. Even fifteen or twenty minutes at the end of the day makes a difference, though stiltgrass can probably grow fifteen inches in the same timeframe.
Because of the garden tour I filled landscape “holes” with containers of annuals. Before leaving on vacation I put as many of them as possible in water-filled saucers and positioned them in the shade. That kept most of them in remarkably good shape for the eleven days, but they still need deadheading, repositioning, and in some cases, consolidation, before they will resume their carefree beauty. The removal of stiltgrass and the desiccated stems and leaves of departed clumps of tradescantia or spiderwort has also left holes. In time I will fill them with divisions of existing plants and a few new specimens that I picked up on vacation.
My best estimate is that it will take three weeks of garden clean-up to remedy the horticultural issues that cropped up during eleven days of vacation. I will reframe that in a positive way and whisper to myself that there is real value in getting reacquainted with the garden in mid-summer. Hopefully the stiltgrass won’t hear me.