Sea Of Putrid Purple Posies

"They're pretty," I remember saying the year I moved here. "I love purple flowers, and there are so many of them!"

"Oooohhh no!" The woman standing at my door from the Jehovah's witnesses contradicted, "Those are the stinkiest flowers you've smelled, they last for a week, then they turn into monsters with inch-long thorns!"



Sure enough, I witnessed the deception of the pretty purple posies as they unveiled​ their true identity. The putrid flowers fell (yes, they really do stink) and thick, inch-long thorns portruded abundantly from every stem, the little weed bushes drying up and covering the ground with a mass of hard, pokey spines!  It was a hot mess of spiky-ness!  

I don't like those purple flowers anymore. I've been fighting them every year. Over conference weekend (first weekend in April) I tackled bunches of them that were over running my garden. An hour of hard, heavy pulling, and I only got a corner of the garden weeded. The ground was still so very wet that the mud just clung to the roots, heaving up so much earth and worms that it made the process slow going. 


It's been a high water year for us and the water table has caused flooding in our subdivision since February. We've been pumping out our crawlspace pretty much every day until just recently. Here's what it looked like conference weekend:


I paid for a service project from the Young Women at our church fundraiser and I decided that they would be my weeding helpers. I arranged to have them come a couple weeks after I tried tackling the project on my own.  They gave me 2 hours of their hard work and I was so blessed to have been the winner of their service project. 

They pulled, picked, and piled every one of those pukey purple weeds, leaving 8 large mounds of the things to die and dry and eventually to be set afire. 

With the help of my daughter, we hauled the piles over the fence to be burned, thus leaving the ground ready for the black plastic to kill the other weeds. 


I was so sore the next day, but it's all part of fighting for a garden in the Wild West!