The unwanted interloper

If anyone ever offers you the opportunity - and calls it ‘the honor’ – of running a community garden, you should run at high speed from the person trying to recruit you. Delete the individual from your phone and email. Change your address. Answer the phone in a foreign language.

600 square feet of Japanese hop

I know this because I spent Monday afternoon removing a nasty, invasive vine from 600 square feet of the conservation land in which the Medfield Community Garden is located; and from which garden I have been removing yet another pernicious vine now for the better part of a month.

Two millennia ago, the poet Virgil wrote the famous Latin line “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”, which translates to: "I fear the Greeks (Danaans), even those bearing gifts." My update is “Beware of anything your town’s Department of Public Works brings you.” It especially applies when you’ve been told that only the DPW can supply something.

As the Community Garden co-manager (or Garden Ogre, and I have titled myself), one of my tasks each spring is to request that tenants of the 70 plots in the acre-sized garden replenish the wood chips that for the ‘streets and avenues’ around their gardens. I start saving newspapers beginning in September so that gardeners can easily a) rake back last year’s chips that did not break down into organic material over the winter; b) put down either cardboard or (preferably) newspapers across the three-foot-wide paths around all sides of their plot; and c) rake the old chips over the newspaper and supplement with fresh chips for a depth not to exceed two inches.

The town's mulch pile, in theory, weed free

Where do the chips come from? Historically, they have come from the Medfield DPW, which take wood debris dumped by homeowners at the town’s transfer station, grinds it up into a mulch, puts it in a large pile where, in theory, the internal temperature of the wood pile will get to just below the combustion point. In the process, those high temperatures will kill off pathogens and sterilize any weed seeds or vines that might have been ground up along with the wood.

The key phrase, is ‘in theory’,

The chips were perfect!

Each year, I request 60 cubic yards of mulch, starting with four piles, each of ten cubic yards. If that isn’t enough, I request more. Last year, for reasons I cannot understand, the DPW pointedly declined to provide additional chips.  Weeds were starting to appear in the unchipped aisles and so, after pleading for six weeks, my co-manager and I used a wonderful, free service called ‘Chip Drop’ which allows tree service firms to avoid paying tipping fees at landfills and, instead, drop off freshly-chipped wood at homes or other locations. You can even specify ‘no logs’ or ‘no branches’. Did I mention it is free?

Two days later, we got ten cubic yards of the best wood chips we had ever seen.  I was in thrall.

But the Community Garden is not a power unto itself. Like many such gardens, we are under the auspices of our town’s Conservation Commission, and the Medfield Conservation Commission takes its stewardship role quite seriously. We are on the site of Medfield’s last working farm, acquired by the town a quarter century ago. I did not ask permission to bring in ‘outside’ chips. And, when it was learned we had not asked permission, my co-manager and I were – and I will use this word because it is the dictionary-perfect description – castigated for violating the trust of the Conservation Commission.

This spring, we requested our usual supply of chips… and were told by the DPW they didn’t have any available because of the cold winter. So, I investigated ‘outside’ wood chips and narrowed the choice to two: Chip Drop (free) and Certified Playground Chips, which are milled from the everwood and pith of hardwood trees.., and are $55 per cubic yard. The community garden collects enough in user fees to pay for the chips, and I agreed to pay any overage from my own pocket.

We were about to order the certified chips when the DPW said it had taken the temperature of its wood mulch pile and found it had gotten high enough to kill off all the bad stuff. The Conservation Commission decreed we should use DPW chips and they were delivered and spread by gardeners in their aisles.

Three weeks ago, I noticed something I had not seen in the garden in almost a decade: bindweed.

For the uninitiated, bindweed is evil incarnate. It exists to make the lives of gardeners miserable. It can regenerate from root pieces as small as two inches.  And, it was all over the garden, vining up fences. I pulled back the mulch around my own plot. Pieces of the bindweed had survived in the wood mulch and taken root. Since then, I have been cajoling my fellow gardeners to cut off the vines at ground level so as to ‘starve’ the roots of energy.

Underneath the hop, the remnants of
the compost pile which harbored seeds

Two weeks ago, I noticed something else. In 2025, the DPW also delivered two truckloads of compost. It looked beautiful.  We augmented the soil in the garden with it. What was left over just stayed in two piles on opposite ends of the garden…. where, this spring, dormant seeds for an invasive vine called Japanese hop germinated and were running wild.

The Japanese hop, removed.

The smaller tangle was removed, unbidden, by one of our long-time gardeners. Which gave me the idea that I could do the larger one. Took me three hours. To clear the vines that came from the seeds brought in by the compost from the DPW.

But it’s done. And, because the vines were removed before they had an opportunity to flower and set seed, it should be the last I see of it. And the satisfaction of a task completed maybe makes it OK to accept an offer to run a community garden after all.

Unless, of course, the DPW has more ‘surprises’ in store for me….

 

Caught In a Bind

Growing up in Florida, I was painfully aware that my home state was – pest-wise – a national laughingstock.  Every week, it seemed, the pages of Time magazine or the evening news had stories about walking catfish; giant African snails that could eat the paint off of your house; and a large toad, bufo marinus that, when licked, produced a hallucinogenic reaction (although exactly how this was discovered remains a mystery I have declined to ponder). 

I learned not to trust
everything I saw on the
cover of the Saturday
Evening Post

My assumption was that the rest of the country was some kind of an agricultural paradise and that New England, with its wholesome Norman Rockwell image, was a place where having a garden was a pleasure.  The growing season would begin on the first day of spring and conclude with a golden-hued harvest at Thanksgiving.

Time has taught me that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.  At the end of May, we consolidated the fifteen miserable kernels of corn that had sprouted (a one-third germination rate) into a single square and re-planted, hoping against hope that, perhaps by the middle of June, the soil temperature will warm up to 70 degrees and it will stop raining.  Moreover, we have yet to pick a single leaf of lettuce or spinach off our miniscule plants and entire rows of other crops in our garden are nowhere to be seen.

But these are minor irritants compared to what is growing in my vegetable garden.  What I have is a bumper crop of bindweed.

In April, I took out an entire
wheelbarrow filled with
bindweed roots

Bindweed, or Convolvulus arvensis to give the plant its proper name, is something that the national media chooses not to report on.  It’s a New England specialty, a weed with a ‘particularly aggressive root and rhizome system’, to quote the Cornell University Extension Service.  What that means in plain English is that, once you get bindweed in your garden, you are consigned to pulling it out for all eternity.  The reason you don’t want bindweed in your garden in the first place is that it will climb other plants and kill them by taking their sunlight and water. 

We never had a bindweed problem until this year; it arrived via a neighboring plot.  But here is how bad it is:  a month ago, I systematically turned over the soil in our vegetable garden and took out a wheelbarrow full of bindweed roots.  This morning, I noticed that little green shoots were poking above the surface in unplanted areas of the garden.  And so, I decided to dig out the shoots, roots and all.  I followed one slender, white root down a foot, where it began running horizontally, ending in a two-inch-long piece of ‘old’ root from our neighbor’s garden that had been turned under by the tractor that plowed our garden last fall. 

Bindweed and its root system.
Double-click on the image to see
at full size.

Think about that:  a tractor chops up a piece of bindweed root and buries it a foot down.  That little piece of root survives being frozen over the winter.  Come spring, it has the energy to send out a tendril eighteen inches in search of light.  Now, repeat this concept several thousand times.  I think I know where the idea for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers came from.

You are probably asking yourself, ‘what about herbicides?’  What, indeed.  A friend recommended an organic solution, a product that is primarily clove oil.  Spray it on anything.  A day later, the leaves of the invasive weed or plant look like they’ve been scorched by fire and the root shrivels into nothingness.  I sprayed this product on a patch of bindweed.  Two days later, the leaves were crispy as advertised.  I followed the roots down into the soil.  They were prospering; pumping iron.  A dozen new shoots already headed for the light.

How about one of those ‘kills everything’ kind of herbicides?  I don’t especially care to use them in my vegetable garden, but this was getting serious.  The Royal Horticultural Society (bindweed, like Simon Cowell, is an unwanted European export to America) offered the bad news:  Spraying in the early spring is ‘generally less successful’.  Instead, the RHS recommends that one wait patiently, sprayer in hand, until bindweed produces its morning glory-type flower (by which time it had taken over your garden).  Even then, the Society cautions, because bindweed roots can reach out twenty feet or more, the herbicide may not reach the ‘mother’ root.  In other words, abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I did find one glimmer of hope in my research.  An enterprising gardener reported that she had eradicated bindweed from her garden.  She diligently dug out every root every time a shoot broke the surface.  She did this day after day, depriving the plant of photosynthesis.  I should add, though, that it took eight years.

Florida ultimately capitalized on its exotic pests by creating things like the ‘International Walking Catfish Derby’ in which fish with rudimentary lungs travel several feet on their pectoral fins.  I have sincere doubts that any such fun events are planned by New England gardeners wondering what to do with their bindweed.