Week 1: Weeds

June 16th, 2008

The first week of the 1812 Weed Patch. Despite the thick covering of Velvet Leaf, one can notice the beet rows ( just about the only weeded plot of the garden) and some newly erected bean teepees.

Welcome! I’m Melissa Balding, a rising senior from Oregon majoring in Environmental Studies at Hamilton College. The ES major at Hamilton is very interdisciplinary; I’ve studied everything from economics, philosophy, and geology for my major. I’m still adding to that list as I am spending my first summer on the east coast tending Hamilton College’s 1812 Garden. I’m a Levitt Center intern participating in the type of faculty- student collaborative research the center sponsors and funds. The 1812 Garden was the brainchild of my professors, Frank Sciacca and David Gapp, and their Food For Thought seminar, which I took last spring semester. The Garden is dedicated to growing heirloom varieties of crops that would have been grown around here when Hamilton College was chartered in 1812.
‘Garden’ might be too strong a word right now, as the plot was more a patch of weeds when I first started working on it just a few days ago.  It hadn’t been tended for about two weeks since the end of the semester.  Right now it’s more a patch of Velvetleaf to be precise, with our heirloom vegetables hiding among the verdant fuzzy leaves of the weed. Abutilon theophrastii (velvetleaf) is a highly invasive species native to China and India. It was cultivated by early colonists for rope and cloth fiber, but is now classified as a noxious weed in most states. True to its name, the young Velvetleaf I set out to slay was so soft it made me wonder if I should just let it grow. The fact that it single handedly made the garden look lush also bolstered my sympathy towards it. It seemed to be just about the only thing growing, aside from some patchy wild mustard (which grew, ironically, everywhere except where we planted its domesticated cousin, which hasn’t come up yet). The weeds are also historically accurate! The Old Sturbridge Village website addresses the typical weedy nature of kitchen gardens as a  “more accurate picture of the common practice. For example, a contributor to the  New England Farmer, a progressive periodical of the 19th century commented in 1827, that, “The few gardens that are seen among our farmers are miserably overrun with weeds, which are permitted to increase, until their removal becomes so serious a job as to appal everyone; and hence it is often difficult to find a beet, parsnip, or carrot among the weeds”” (Old Sturbridge Village Website: http://www.osv.org/explore_learn/document_viewer.php?DocID=747). So who am I, to condemn plants so thriving, robust and historically accurate? Thoreau offered some similar thoughts on weeds, asking us to “consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds... disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, leveling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another” (Walden, pg 108). Once I shook the dirt from the roots of my first handful of weeds however, all my sympathy dissolved. The seemingly innocent plants where just choking everything else out! Every day now I’ve come to the rescue of the corn, potatoes, peas, cabbages, carrots, beans, turnips, beets and squash in the form of ‘liberation weeding.’ After a week of this constant form of gardening, I’ve borrowed more thoughts on weeds from Thoreau and will leave you with this final collage of thoughts: “We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction... This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it which water it and make it green. As these fields have results which are not harvested by us, how, then can our harvests fail? Shall we not rejoice also at the abundance of weeds who seeds are the granary of the birds?” (Walden, page 112).

Melissa Balding
“The 1812 Garden”
Levitt Center Intern
Hamilton College