Confessions of a Crack Weeder

Gardening is hard work... often unappreciated hard work! And it has always been that way!

I realized this after reading British poet (and gardener), Rudyard Kipling's words, written a hundred years ago:

“Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made

By singing - 'Oh how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade,

While better men than we go out and start their working lives

At grubbing weeds from gravel paths with broken dinner knives”*

There is a lot of thankless work involved in gardening. One of the obstacles all gardeners face is persistent WEEDS. Kipling's gardener friends toiled to get them out of gravel paths. I'm trying to get them out of my brick driveway - which sprouts more and more uninvited plants each year.

And instead of using a broken dinner knife, I have a special tool called a 'Crack Weeder.' (Yes, that's really what it's called!)













I was so excited when I discovered it - after watching some maintenance workers weeding the cracks in the sidewalk in one of the city parks. I immediately went out and bought my own Crack Weeder at my neighborhood Home Depot store. I thought my crack weeding problems would be over...

The plan was to do a little every day, until the driveway and walkway looked as good as new!

Now for my confession... I never did manage to get rid of all the weeds.













While I was working on one part of the driveway (hunched over, sitting on my little chair), they came back with a vengeance in another part! With all the rain we had, the weeds grew quickly... So I gave up... And the weeds won... this year!













But next year, I plan to try again. I have also come to the realization that I also need to find something (vinegar?) to put into the cracks to deter plants from growing back! But I don't want to ruin the soil...

Maybe I need to go to a British gardening website and see what they are using... After all, they have several hundred years' head start on me!

(By the way, the lines of poetry I quoted above are from 'The Glory of the Garden', by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1911.)