Weeds and things

Today's Master Gardener class was on weeds, which was actually quite interesting. For example, I learned that many of our most pervasive and obnoxious weeds are of European origin, and that we can blame the fall of Constantinople in 1453 for their arrival here. Seriously. When the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople and controlled the Black Sea, it became very expensive for Europeans to trade with India, China, and other Asian countries. Enter Christopher Columbus and his search for a western route to the Orient. The wooden ships of the time needed ballast to provide stabilization on the ocean, and if they offloaded cargo on one side of the Atlantic, they needed something to replace its weight. The cheapest and easiest thing to do was to fill barrels with local dirt....and the weed seeds, fungi, bacteria, and other inhabitants of the soil came along for the ride.

I also now can identify and call some weeds by their proper names before attempting to kill them. The tall ones with leaves that look sort of like giant dandelions? Prickly lettuce, also called compass plant because the leaves grow north and south. The low-growing stuff with many small leaves that exudes a sticky sap (which is poisonous, by the way, and could cause eye damage if you rub your eye while weeding) Spurge. The feathery ones that like to hide and grow in shrub plantings, and that have a tap root that goes down to China? Desert broom, which unlike most things that are growing unwanted in my backyard, is actually a native plant.

I'm certain I will have plenty of practice naming weeds in the next few days. We got quite a bit of rain the last few days. Monsoon rains in the desert are always needed and provide a bit of cooling respite from the 100-plus normal temperatures for this time of the year. But, in addition to making our flowers, vegetables, and trees happy, they also cause weed seeds that were hiding dormant in our yard to sprout and proliferate.