By Carina Magyar in Nuisances — Feb 11, 2023

III: Quackgrass

This weed is the ultimate meme.

A tuft of couch grass. Photo by Lily C. / Unsplash

Good morning. Today is tridi, the 23rd of Pluviôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le chiendent, a grass that loves to crawl where it's not wanted.

💡

Most plants fall in the calendar when they're in full bloom, or have a ripened edible, or are otherwise at their most beautiful. This nasty grass with many names – the French word translates literally as "dogtooth" – is listed when it's completely dormant. Why? Because this is the best time of the year to rip it out and carefully burn it far from any field you want to sow. It propagates by creeping under the ground and pushing up a shoot of grass every few inches, so when you pull one tuft of grass up, the roots break off under ground and keep on creeping around, doing their thing. It's a brilliant innovation to weather the voracious storm of herbivorous animals in a meadow, but it's hell on farmers and backyard gardeners alike. Stake this vampire whilst it sleeps.

I burned a yard to get rid of this stuff. Sometime during the early days of the pandemic, I lost track of my little backyard and it went wild with seed from a nearby meadow. At first I didn't mind because, living in Central Texas at the time, I was hoping for an invasion of the region's famous wildflowers, maybe even some bluebonnets. Then I noticed the quackgrass.

The regular weeds were a bear to pull when it was time to restore the yard to order, but the patch of quackgrass had quickly become an underground ecosystem of endless whack-a-mole. No amount of pulling and forking and tearing would solve the issue. So I made the fateful decision to scorch the earth with weed killer, wait a decent interval for the screams of the grass to die down, then cover the whole plot with several inches of fresh new soil.

Ever since then, I've had a different relationship with memes.

III: Quackgrass

II: Daphne

IV: Knotgrass

II: Daphne

IV: Knotgrass

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