Chickweed is fall and winter greens and medicine

       

Some of the biggest chickweed tops I've ever seen this year, with leaves 1 1/4 inch or more.

          Chickweed is a dependable fall and winter green for chickens and people.  It tastes like grass, sweet and lightly bitter, and makes good salad and sandwich greens or wilted salad for people.  Cut the just the top inch of stems with its new leaves and flowers for best eating.  The stems can be rather tough below that. Chop the tips for salad and sandwiches; cover with boiling water long enough to wilt the greens to eat it like spinach.  Save the water and drink it for the vitamins and minerals, and to help with weight loss.

Unlike dandelion and wild lettuce, it is not bitter when blooming, and is full of A, B and C vitamins, magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc.  This year, I am finding the chickweed leaves bigger than ever before under locusts by the river.

          Chickens love fresh chickweed best in fall and winter.  Chicks love the seeded plants in late spring for their seeds.  I just pull the stems by the handful and fill a grocery bag for my flock. 

Chickweed is also good for eye medicine.  Make a tea with the leaves, let it cool, and drip it into the eye.  It stings a little for a few minutes.  I’ve cleared up many cases of pink eye and kitten eye infections with chickweed tea.  If it doesn’t work, pink eye is not the reason one’s eyes are red, or you may be allergic to it.  I researched it this year and found many medicinal uses I’ve never thought about, including a salve recipe I intend to try.

          It grows best in our area by the river under locust other trees with soft leaves that are quickly eaten by worms and make rich soil.  I’ve seen some under shrubs by the post office.  It starts growing with the first fall rains, and blooms through the winter into late spring, when even the newest growth gets rather leggy and is not as good for salads and such.  This is a good time to pull quantities of the plant and spread it in a good growing location.  Once it has made enough seed, it dies down until fall.

To keep it available for medicine year-round in your garden where it is watered regularly, keep pulling the above-ground portion of the plant as it blooms, before it makes seed.  Being an annual, it will keep growing until it makes enough seed.  It is one plant that doesn’t make a crown between root and stems, so it can’t be stopped by cutting below the crown.  It tends to break off at or above ground level when one is pulling it, so ironically, the way to keep it in your garden all summer is to keep pulling it as it blooms.  The way to get rid of it all summer is to let it seed out in the spring, or smother it with mulch, the easiest way to lose it entirely.

Published 12-21-2021 at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

 

An article with almost too much information: https://www.healthbenefitstimes.com/chickweed/

This one has a concise rundown of its vitamins, minerals, and medicinal constituents:

https://draxe.com/nutrition/chickweed/

Give us a real break

 

New Water Treatment Plant site, cleaned for construction.

            Council decided to give the New Water Treatment Plant Project three million dollars of our ARPA funding for a down payment on our new water plant.  You also plan to give ratepayers a small break on our rates in return.  

At first, the City and The Daily Courier said that the City would cancel the last two years of base rate raises that are supposed to help pay the loan.  But they also said that the unit rate raises for the new plant would continue, as well as inflation and raising the separate new plant debt payment fee.  Lately, Courier articles and City staff have become less specific about which rates would be curtailed.

If you stop increasing base rates, but keep increasing unit rates, as unit rates rise, ratepayers will collectively cut back further on water use, decreasing revenue.  This will make the City raise unit and base rates to cover the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water plant, clawing back our expected $8 savings on the base rate.  Or the City might dip into the ARPA $3,000,000 to cover it, decreasing our future down payment and increasing our interest.

If you stopped the new plant unit rate raises instead of base rates, we would be paying more from base rates and no more for our use, and our rates might stabilize. 

When you passed the new plant payment fee, we were told that it would not rise by inflation and would go away when the debt was paid.

We were not told then that the fee would not cover the whole loan.  Twenty-two percent of eighty million dollars is being put on our base and unit rates, increasing by 5.28%, plus inflation, yearly for five years, will never go away, and will rise by inflation, every year until this rationing rate system is reformed.

You, our Council, can set base rates to cover all overhead: debt payments; operations; administration; maintenance; and actual inflation of plant costs.  You can lower all unit rates to one rate, paying for only unit costs, which rise and fall with our water use.  This was the way we paid for our plant and the cost of producing and delivering clean water with it, for over fifty years.  Grants Pass was watered; rates were low and stable.  To return to that rate system would be a real and permanent improvement in our health, wealth, safety, and happiness.     

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 12-1-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Some People Can’t See the Good

 

         

Dear Editor,

             The Daily Courier published an article 11-17-2021, “IV Water District makes plea for state help," regarding the problems caused by illegal pot growing operations disguised as hemp farms.  One of the complaints in the article is that some of these farms are buying bulk water from Cave Junction's station.  Some people just don't know a good thing when they see it.

            City bulk water is legal to buy for all uses.  Cave Junction’s bulk rates are $30/1000 gallons.  Ratepayers of Cave Junction pay a top-tier rate of $2.05/100 cubic feet, or $2.74/1000g, for water delivered to their taps by pipelines. 

Everyone who buys bulk water at $30/1000g is paying some of the overhead that city ratepayers are not paying as they cut back on irrigation and other water use to pay high unit rates.  Bulk water users keep ratepayers’ unit and base rates from climbing still higher to pay the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water system, as they keep cutting back on use. 

This is what modern city rate systems do, rationing water by price, with a base rate too low to cover the overhead and high unit rates to discourage use.  But the City thereby depends on high unit rates to cover the overhead, which leaves it always chasing the overhead.  

Businesses can’t survive this way.  But water and sewer plants can; they are natural monopolies.  But they don’t have to; the Council could set base rates to cover all overhead and stop rationing water by rates.

 

Sincerely,

 

Rycke Brown

Birds Love a Fountain

 

            We bought a bird house about twenty years ago, which occasionally was used by birds over the years, but not every year.  This year, my daughter’s mate used cedar fence boards to make sills for our new windows.  He had pieces of scrap that he built a new style of birdhouse with and hung 3 of them along the east wall of our house this spring as sparrows mobbed to mate.   All the boxes were quickly taken.

            A couple years before, we built a chicken run around 3 sides of our toolshed with nest boxes in the east wall of the shed, shaded and sheltered by our neighbor’s tall timber bamboo, and put perches outside under the bamboo and a large south overhang.  Hens are well-insulated birds; they do fine outside in winter here.  That winter, I started feeding them cooked brown rice and meat along with kitchen scraps, grains, greens and mulch for growing worms.  Sparrows found the soft rice very much to their liking as well.

            This summer, I traded $300 worth of gardening labor for a wonderful heavy fountain that had not been filled for years.  We put it in my front yard near a sweet gum and a witch hazel full of evergreen China Blue vine, out front of our picture window.  Having to top off the fountain every day helps me remember to water my potted plants and pull weeds out front. 

The sparrows love the fountain.  Other birds also visit: hummingbirds; chickadees; a flock of quick, tiny birds; and a jay.   We have watched the smaller birds eating pests off our garden plants.  Recently, we added a hummingbird feeder outside our dining room window which is being well used.

The "quick, tiny birds" were Ruby-Crowned Kinglets. I finally got a good look at one and found its name by searching "tiny gray birds with red spot on head."

Having water, food, and bird houses and a huge twisty willow tree in our yard has filled our yard with birds.  This fall, our sparrows and hummingbirds raised an extra set of young in October because they had everything they need.  A hummingbird was recently singing his territory.

We have cats outdoors.  They haven’t made a dent in the bird population.  What has been depleting the number of birds, bees, and bugs in our city and our world is lack of water.  We rarely see or hear mosquitoes in Grants Pass anymore.  Because of water-rationing rates, we haven’t been watering our yards or our birds like we used to during the 50 years when water was so cheap to use, we thought of it as free.

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 11-17-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners,

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Tokay Heights has a dump in the middle--Open email

To: the Josephine County Board of Commissioners 

     Grants Pass City Council, Mayor and City Manager

Honorable Public Servants,

As I walked the NE ward of Grants Pass in late October, placing water rate reform leaflets at doors of residences along NE Tokay Heights, I came upon a residential dump.  

This is not just some random abandoned property, trashed by those who seek shelter on it; it appears to be a business dump for the owner of 701 NE Tokay Heights, General Property Group LLC.  It is .99 acre of garbage and wood trash left in dump-truck-size piles and mixed into the dirt.  Two little houses on that property are falling apart among the trash piles.

It is along a stretch of gravel road between the two paved and developed ends of NE Tokay Heights.  At the Northwest end of that gravel, at the top of NE Elida, there are no signs regarding trespassing.  At the Southwest end, at the top of NE A Street and just below other residences on Tokay Heights, there is a no trespassing/private property sign.  But one does not have to trespass to see it is a dump from either end.  

It exists in a heart-shaped two-property cutout on that edge of the city, outside the city limits.  The owner of the neighboring cut-out property tries to keep trespassers off it when he sees them.

Sincerely yours,

Rycke

A pond drains my yard; a willow shades it

 

            We moved to Grants Pass in 1999 and bought a house on Bridge Street in October.  The first winter, our backyard flooded with water.  In the lowest point of our backyard, I dug a small pond to capture the water and pump it out to the street.  I eventually lined it with rubber and then rocks and made a watercourse and fall on the mound of dirt from the pond, lined and covered with rock.  I put a pump in the pond and laid irrigation line to send excess water to the street and added a line to the top of the watercourse, so I could flip switches to change it from pumping out, to recirculating, and back.

          The next spring, I stuck a twisty willow twig in the ground on the other side of the mound.  It grew fast and well, to about fifty feet tall and wide in about ten years.  Its girth is now one hundred eleven inches at three feet.  For a twisty willow, it is very strong and has not lost major branches in snowstorms like some have. 

The shade from that tree covers most of our backyard near the house after one o’clock PM and allows my grandkids to play on a little swing set and swim in an above-ground pool on hot days. It is vital to our use of our backyard.

          Two years ago, I wanted to redo the pond liner and we took the rocks and liner out and reshaped it a bit.  Last winter, it refilled and stayed filled, despite the dry spring.  I decided that twenty years of water in it had compacted the soil sufficiently to leave out the liner and just replace the rocks. 

This summer, the ground within six feet of the pond on the opposite side from the willow stayed moist but still firm underfoot, and our roses within that damp zone were happier than they had ever been.  The willow apparently sucked water only from the soil and the pond on its side.  It had no die-back and dropped far fewer twigs and leaves over this summer.

On the other hand, this magnificent tree has become expensive over the years and especially this year as it sucks as much water as it needs, because of the high and rapidly rising price of city water by the unit. 

This is another reason why we should not conserve water by rationing through high unit rates.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 11-4-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners,

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener    541-955-9040    rycke@gardener.com

Big tech data centers spark worry over scarce Western water

 

I read a shorter article about this in the Daily Courier. This article is much longer and answers some of my questions. But the writers and the worriers seem to think that the water in the Columbia and other major rivers comes only from rain and snowmelt.

The water in our rivers mainly comes from springs that pours out of cracks in the Earth's crust from the mantle, which is soaked with water. Otherwise, our river would run out in the 100-day droughts we have had in recent years.

The Columbia River is a mighty river indeed. The Rogue River doesn't compare. But the 3.9 million gallon water right that Google bought with their land is nothing next to what the City of Grants Pass pulls out of the Rogue every day. Our plant can produce 20 million gallons of clean water per day. We put much of it back in the river, cleaned to drinking water standards after sewage treatment, and so does Medford and its suburbs.

Associated Press reporters seem to think that water is a scarce and precious resource, when it is the most abundant and automatically recycled resource on Earth, next to air. The water cycle plus modern water and sewage treatment make it really hard to waste water, except by letting it run straight to the sea without being used along the way.

"About an hour’s drive east of The Dalles, Amazon is giving back some of the water its massive data centers use. Amazon’s sprawling campuses, spread between Boardman and Umatilla, Oregon, butt up against farmland, a cheese factory and neighborhoods. Like many data centers, they use water primarily in summer, with the servers being air-cooled the rest of the year.

"About two-thirds of the water Amazon uses evaporates. The rest is treated and sent to irrigation canals that feed crops and pastures."

And "evaporation is waste," we were told in Landscape Management by a teacher who was selling us on drip systems. It is a common trope among modern water conservationists. But evaporation is not waste; it makes humidity, clouds and rain.

West of the Rockies, our water vapor, from any source, makes clouds and rain in the local area first if there is enough of it. (Water-rationing rates in our cities keep that from happening as much as it used to.) What is left blows uphill and upstream on the prevailing western wind, making rain as it rises, filling creeks and rivers before the remainder goes over the mountains to join vapor from other sources, like irrigation, and make more rain.

Drought is a self-fulfilling prophecy in Oregon, because it is declared every time we don't get enough snowpack to keep our reservoirs full. They fail to take into account the effects of irrigation, evaporation, and the water cycle. Real conservation of fresh water is keeping water from running to the sea so fast.

Beavers did it before man came to North America, building dams and swamps until every rivulet, creek and small river valleys were filled with their dams and swamps. Water tables were high and the continent was full of game. After they were nearly wiped out, man began to do some of what they did with bigger dams and watering farms and cities, storing water in the soil that not only grew plants but kept rivers higher from runoff, above and below ground.

Now our cities are mostly dry ground with only a portion of the residents actually watering their properties, and have started burning because of that dryness, not only within them, but in the countryside around them, because there is less watering vapor to spread out and keep things moist.

Water is the basis of life. That doesn't make it scarce or precious; it makes it vital to living and living well. Brown and yellow is not the new green. It is the ugly color of fire danger and less life, because there is less water in the land, even right down next to the river in the photo with this article.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/big-tech-data-centers-spark-worry-scarce-western-80730977?fbclid=IwAR1z7jbzkg_1dwcoXVIjeDSs1iSdWyo442kq_cDh-_mZvMJkS79pKDC_F3c

Asking public servants to ignore the law

Yesterday, I got a call from a person who was totally frustrated with the way the City Council doesn’t listen to her and her neighbors when asked to not allow the Sobering Center and now Foundry Village to be built in their neighborhood. She was also upset that the public were told to not speak about the very reason they were at the meeting, not wanting drunks and homeless people in their neighborhood. She was saying that they never listen, so why should she complain about our water and sewer rates?

Land use hearings always have specific criteria that one can speak to, and outside of that, they cannot rule. They give the rules in the introduction and the applicable criteria in the presentation. That you don’t like the kind of people that use a service in your neighborhood isn’t allowed in the criteria.

Last night, there was a delegation of 8-10 people with a couple of speakers who implored the City and Council to enforce the city code against camping in parks, so regular taxpayers can enjoy them. Several Councilors explained that their hands were tied by state and federal law as well as a court order to allow nightly camping in all parks but the All-Sports Park and are not allowed to evict campers for violations of code or camping rules without 72-hour notice. The city is being sued for criminalizing homelessness with camping bans.

You want the Council to listen to you? Don’t ask them to ignore the law. On the few occasions when they have listened to people who didn’t want certain people in their neighborhood, they have been overruled by the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA).

In the case of campers in the parks, if the City ignores the court, it will be found in contempt of court and likely lose their case. We will probably have to put up with campers in our parks until the city builds sufficient shelters to meet their need.

One Councilor keeps pointing out that little houses, small pallet shelter campgrounds and a warming center will not meet the need and not get campers out of our parks. All of them will also have restrictions on who can use such shelter beyond being peaceful and law-abiding, because they are limited and people in the neighborhood don’t want those without shelter lining up early to get in.

What can meet the need is a couple of large hostels, cheap places to shower and sleep for $5-$10 per night, one for families and one for adults only, to keep kids separated from sex offenders. Think of a building like a grocery store with a large open space where there would be hundreds of cots, 6 feet apart, surrounded by: bathrooms; showers; lockers; a dog kennels; a meeting rooms for classes; a reading/dining room; and a parking lot planted with fruits and vegetables in planting strips, all fenced for use only by its customers. No food service, and few rules: be quiet and peaceful; don’t show anyone your guns or drugs; don’t litter or make a mess around one’s bed. Violators could be temporarily or permanently trespassed or made to pick up litter for minor infractions.

When it comes to asking the Council to reform our water rates to pay all the overhead with base rates and only marginal unit costs with unit rates, they have the power to do so. There is nothing in state or federal law that requires water-rationing rates.

You can ask by email, phone calls, writing on the city Facebook page, in person when you meet them, or a 3-minute comment at City Council meetings, first and third Wednesdays at 6:00. Control your anger; don’t attack them; and speak nicely if you want to influence them. They are public servants, but they are not only your servants. Don’t expect instant action; they need a lot of people contacting them frequently to be convinced to change a rate system that has been in place for over 20 years and to buck what has been instituted in cities around the world over the last 35 years.

Join Friends of the Restwell Center to support hostels and fill out your City survey to support use of ARPA funds to build them. It’s due October 22nd. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1681019735495611

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook and contact the council about water and sewer rates every month.

Earth is reflecting less light comment

 

Earth is reflecting less light. It’s not clear if that's a trend | Science News

I shared this article because, while it mentioned the possibility of climate change being involved, it did not talk about trace gases being the cause. I had dropped Science News for about 2 years because they had been selling trace-gas-caused climate change with a heavy hand, mentioning it every chance they got. I was curious today and looked at the latest articles. This one wasn't even in the email; it was on their site. The others didn't mention anything about climate change in the blurb. I also saw that they aren't allowing comment on threads, but one can give feedback by email.

So I wrote an email to the author, pointing out that I had seen the disappearance of our morning clouds and fall and winter fogs, and that climate change is a likely cause, but it is not being changed by trace gases, but by lack of water vapor in the air because of water rationing rates around the world. There is also brown grass, bark and rock landscaping where there had been green grass, and less snow on mountaintops, causing drought declarations in the West.

I will have to read more SN articles and may subscribe again.

Why Should We Save Water?

 

            I agreed with ninety-five percent of the Mayor’s Proclamation, “Imagine a day without water,” I really liked the word, “vital.”  I agreed right up to the end, where she asked us to please help the city provide clean, pressurized water by conserving it.

          How does buying less of the product the utility is selling help the utility, the ratepayers or anything in any way?  Selling water is now vital to paying its overhead.

Utilities are high-overhead businesses.  From the time our water system was built until the nineties, we paid all the overhead, the monthly expenses of the system, in monthly base rates, and only marginal unit costs in unit rates. 

No matter how much or little we used the service, the overhead was paid every month and base and unit rates stayed low and stable.  If we had a breakdown in the plant that kept it from treating any water for a month or more, the overhead and unit costs would still be paid, and our water utility would not go bankrupt.

Since sometime in the nineties, ratepayers have been charged rationing rates on water, with a lower base rate and higher unit rates.  Unit charges were most of my bill in summer of 2001.  But few people stopped watering until 2006, when rates were restructured to greatly discourage irrigation.  The base rate dropped more, and units were hiked enough to make many people stop watering, the easiest use to cut, as the Great Recession began.  Banks didn’t water their repossessed properties, either.

Two years later, Staff told the Council that the new rates were working too well.  People had conserved so much that the utility was unable to pay its overhead!  Staff asked Council to raise the base rate back to where it had been before, which would stabilize the rates. 

But use kept dropping, and both base and unit rates kept rising.  Unit rates are too high.  We’ve been chasing the overhead and cheating on maintenance ever since as rates keep rising faster than inflation. It is the easiest overhead item to cut, just like watering is for homeowners and banks.  Now our ninety-year-old water plant is slowly falling apart and we have to build a new one.

I had a live-in boyfriend.  After two years, I knew I couldn’t marry him.  After ten years, I decided to stop making the same mistake every day and gave him thirty-day notice. 

We’ve had over twenty years of water-rationing rates, fifteen years of seriously rationing rates.  When will we stop making the same mistake? 

                             

Three-minute comment to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-20-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener         541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

Heron's bill is blooming in fall. Time to kill it.

 

Heron’s bill (Erodium sp., AKA fillaree or storksbill) is blooming in fall.  It used to be one of the earliest flowers in the spring; this is new.  But many spring shrub flowers bloom again in fall in Grants Pass.  It started sprouting in midsummer in watered parts of the Reinhart Volunteer park, possibly because of cloudiness from Southwest monsoons getting this far north, and wildfire smoke shading, humidifying and cooling us for several weeks, after a long stretch of very hot weather in July.  Wood is made mostly from carbon dioxide and water, to which it returns when burned.

Large and coarsely divided

      red stem, coarse short leaf

finely divided, flat rosette

                                                                                                            young, fine, fluffy

            Its leaves are long and divided, growing in a rosette from fall through winter.  They can grow flat or fluffy, coarsely finely divided, with petioles that can be red, green, or shades between of pink or orange.  They hybridize readily.  As it blooms, it grows to about knee-high unless mowed.  If it is only mowed, it keeps making seed, like any annual weed, flowering and seeding under the mower blades.  Mowing thus does not control its spread.  Beating young plants into the dirt with a weed whacker can thin them out considerably.  Doing it again can finish the job.

Mowed heron's bill with fat petals.  Note the long, upright seed pods, center

             It has five-petaled 1/4 "-3/8" pink flowers whose petals vary from thin to fat.  They make seed pods 2-4 inches long that stick straight up as they grow and ripen.  The pods split into two seeds of about ¼ - 3/8 inches long with barbs on the seed and a long tail that spirals as it dries and pops the seeds off the plant.  The tail has a straight part at the end that sticks out at right angles to the seed and spiral.  When it gets wet, the spiral unwinds, and with the tail sticking to the ground, screws the seed into the ground at the other end—or into your pet’s fur, or eyes, nose, or ears.  It grows all over Grants Pass in neglected areas.

            I used to wait until heron’s bill bloomed to kill it, the blooms being the easiest way to find it, and not being certain that it would not come back if cut earlier.  But the flowers close by late morning; it makes seed fast; and it is harder to see after being mowed.  So I now kill it as I see it all winter, and it does not come back.  

            The easiest way to kill heron's bill is to pull it from soft soil.  In hard soil, I cut it under the crown, through the root, rather than trying to pull the taproot.  As an annual, it has no buds on its roots and dies if the crown is cut off, unlike dandelions and other perennials. 

            My favorite weed cutting tool has long been carbon-steel gardening scissors.  But this year, I have been cutting under weed crowns with a folding box cutter, that I keep in my back pocket.  I've also used a hula hoe, which get most of the crowns, and then go back and get the rest a few days or weeks later.  This year, I found hand hula hoes at Bimart that I can keep in my back pack and cleared most of a wet patch this fall.

Seedlings en masse

            As shocking as it might seem as a natural gardener, I am willing to use glyphosate to kill large expanses of weeds, as it is the most natural and safest of herbicides, being an amino acid, glycine, with a phosphate group attached.  It is only absorbed through green surfaces like stems and leaves.  Bacteria eat it in soil; it does not absorb into roots or bark.  Worms and pill bugs love it and multiply under its influence, as it is rich in nitrogen.  It is also a broadleaf and annual plant fertilizer, being also rich in phosphorus for making flowers and seed.  

            Worms and pill bugs attract moles, which make a mess.  Broadleaf fertilizer grows broadleaf weeds, but perennials like clover or creeping Jenny (Lysimachia) can be planted two weeks later and suck up that fertility, helping crowd out the weeds.  I think that the city at one point sprayed glyphosate all over the wild areas along the walking path from Greenwood to the pedestrian bridge in Reinhart Park and didn't plant anything to soak up that fertility, as all the plants along it are common annual and/or broadleaf weeds, mostly noxious.

Tiny heron's bill after glyphosate spraying in early spring.  

            Another problem arises if glyphosate is used on baby weeds when temperatures stay below 75 degrees F.  They can immediately make flowers and seed instead of dying.  The dwarfing effect can persist for two generations, leaving one having to manually kill a lot of tiny seeding weeds

            Without such influence, weeds tend to crowd each other out as bugs eat the losers in the struggle for light and nutrients, leaving many fewer, much larger weeds to flower, which is the easiest time to pull a plant.  When annual plants flower, the roots shrink as stems and flowers grow, and the stems become tough by the time they flower, which makes it easy to pull them.

Cranesbill, Mid-February

            There is a related plant, called cranesbill (Geranium sp.), with slightly smaller fringed pink petals and short seeds that don’t stick into your pets.  The leaves are round and divided, with long petioles.  It is not nearly as noxious as heron’s bill, though it is listed as a noxious weed in Oregon for its takeover habit.  Ironically, heron's bill is not.  It is easier to pull than heron’s bill, and not near as common in Grants Pass.

Edited 10/15/21 and republished online at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com  

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Like Garden Grants Pass on Facebook. 

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Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com