Sign in Subscribe
By Carina Magyar in Nuisances —

IV: Knotgrass

There was an old lady who swallowed a fungus.

quartidi, the 24th of Pluviôse, Year CCXXXI
Common knotgrass. Photo by Mike Pennington via Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning. Today is quartidi, the 24th of Pluviôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la trainasse, another weed that at least tastes okay this time.

💡
This isn't a true grass, but a relative of buckwheat that resembles grass in its tenaciousness and spread. What keeps it from being a true grass are the small flowers and tiny nut that it produces. Ancient Germanic people ate knotgrass in their porridge. The reason it's such a tenacious weed is that its seed actually need light to germinate, so if they sit under the soil, they remain dormant and invisible until the ground is tilled in preparation for sowing. Come back a few weeks later with the seeds you want to plant and all of a sudden you find yourself facing knotgrass everywhere. What a pest.

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. Perhaps she'll die.

The remainder of that song goes up a pseudo-predator chain, teaching children that, in essence, there's always a bigger fish. She swallows a spider to eat the fly, then a bird to eat the spider, then a cat to eat the bird, then a dog to, I don't know, annoy the cat? Then things get weird with a goat to bite the dog and cow to kick the goat and a horse to probably round up the cow but at that point the old lady is quite dead.

This cautionary tale teaches a pretty good lesson in skepticism about using a predator to rid yourself of prey, as you generally just end up with a new predator problem. But beleive me when I say I've read a lot of studies and committee reports and science papers about parasites, and things work a little differently on that food chain. Let's follow the story of an old lady who swallowed some knotgrass.

Previous

III: Quackgrass

 Next

V: Hare

You might also like...