Inorganic Gardening: Rhubarb Flowers and the Giant Magic Marker of Death

Today was "spray day". This early in the spring, I've only planted a few rows in the garden. The rest of the garden has been sitting for three weeks and weeds are starting to pop up. That's a good thing. It gives me a chance to eliminate some of the weed seeds before they are competition with my plants.

I sprayed the entire un-planted part of the garden with Roundup this evening. Roundup is a non-selective (kills everything) herbicide. It's absorbed by the green parts of a plant and blocks one chemical involved in photosynthesis. The plant can't make sugar and starves to death in a few days. I also sprayed a circle around my fruit trees, between all my blackberries, blueberries, and grapes, and wherever I could spray in the asparagus and rhubarb without killing anything I want to keep.

Roundup in the garden

I hate to hand weed or hoe so I spray anything I can. In fact, most people mow the lawn and then trim the strips around stuff where the mower wouldn't go. Not me. Whatever I can't get with my riding mower gets sprayed with roundup. A 6" dead strip around the house, shop, shrubs, trees, and anything else that doesn't move saves me lots of time keeping the yard cut.

The rhubarb is really taking off. It's flowering now. It was a new planting last spring, I've never grown it before, and I just don't know much about rhubarb. I didn't realize it had such big flowers. I think I'll get quite a bit of rhubarb this year. I wonder what rhubarb is used for?

Rhubarb flowering

One place where I really have weed problems is my strawberries. I've got a strawberry patch that's probably 25' long and 4' wide and the weeds are almost uncontrollable. The problem is that strawberries grow so close together that you can't get in there to get rid of the weeds. Hand weeding is too much work and there's no way to work a hoe in the tiny spaces without damaging the strawberry plants. spraying is definitely out of the question.

Always looking for an easier way to do something, I did something different this year. About a month ago, before any of the summer weeds had began to sprout, I sprayed the strawberries with a chemical called napropamide. Napropamide doesn't' kill anything that's growing but it does prevent any seeds from sprouting. The idea is that the winter weeds that were growing when I sprayed will die off when the weather warms up and the weeds that normally sprout in the Spring just won't.

strawberries (three leaves) and the weeds (everything else).

I actually think it's working. There's a lot more bare space between the strawberry plants than there was last year at this time. But I've still got some weeds in there that I have to deal with. I'd love to spray them with Roundup but I'd just end up killing the strawberries. What to do?

Not to worry, I came up with an idea. What if I had a giant magic marker, you know a 6 foot long felt tip pen that was filled with Roundup instead of ink? Then I could stick it in between the strawberries and draw the herbicide right on the weeds where I wanted it. So I built one. It's not fancy, just a few plastic pipe fittings and a 6' piece of 1/2" PVC pipe. A threaded cap on one end to allow filling the pipe with herbicide and some sort of wick on the other end to act like the felt tip.

The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death

The wick turned out to be the problem. I jambed a tightly rolled piece of cotton rag, a tightly rolled piece of felt, and a firmly compressed kitchen sponge into the end of the pipe. Each time, my test herbicide (plain water) just dripped out through the wick during each test. I can't have Roundup dripping , making little dead spots in the grass, as I walk out to the garden. The final experimental wick was a donation made by my wife. I'll just say it goes by the French word for plug. That turned out to be a failure too. I ended up just dipping the donated wick in Roundup and dabbing it on the weeds. That worked fine for today but my wick experiments are not over. It took Edison a thousand tries to find a suitable light bulb filament. When I perfect this, Maybe I'll patent the "wick hoe", otherwise known as The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death. Another garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX.