And when Penny and I headed home from the local railway station, after our regular Monday walk to see Human Number Two off on the train, we paused to glance into this piece of waste land. (You can just see the tips of Penny's hair at the bottom of the photo.)
Weeds are so good at helping Mother Nature to fix the injuries we humans do to her skin. I've been reading a pdf of a book written in 1950 about the discovery that weeds are our friends, not our enemies. The writer, Joseph A. Cocannouer, must have been brave to pioneer an appreciation of weeds in an age when most farmers and gardeners had declared war on them. The book is called Weeds; Guardians of the Soil, and I recommend it to every gardener and farmer. (It's a free download.)
I guess it was a Very Good Day for Penny today, because she went on two walks. In the afternoon we came across a lovely example of a wild brassica, but I didn't know which one it was, so I brought it home to wash it thoroughly and taste it. Delicious. We also found lots of pine needles, which I'm going to spread across the pot of blueberries as a mulch.
Here's the brassica.
6 comments:
I remember that book with the green cover. I used to use it as an example of how we can read a passage and have NO IDEA what it means. We could read it aloud, sounding out all the unfamiliar words, of which there are many, and could not say what the book was telling us. We knew it was from a book about weeds, we had the picture of the weed and we STILL didn't know what it was trying to tell us.
What fun walks for you, Penny - and two walks are always better than one!
Love ya lots♥
Mitch and Molly
We have a ton of friends (weeds) growing in our vegetable garden.
Mary, I know what you mean about some texts being impossible to read unless you have the background knowledge. I have at least learned one new word to help me make sense of it. The word is 'runcinate'. (I think I've got it right.) I wrote about this fun word in my other blog: http://wordsallaround.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/runcible-gardening.html
Lassie and Benji, you could help those friends along by weeing on them now and then. I'm sure they'd like a dose of urine. On the other hand, when Penny wees on the weeds in our paths, they die, so that's another way you might help out.
Mitch and Molly, I guess Penny would go for three walks a day, if her humans had the energy...
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