Weeds, that is. Especially the nastiest, most pernicious, hard-to-pull-out kind. Dandelions whose long tap roots have cannily wedged their way under asphalt or between paving blocks. The dreaded Canadian Thistle - no offense to our neighbors to the North, I'm sure Canada had nothing to do with this scourge. Plantains likewise ensconsed in broken asphalt driveways. Clumps of grasses with evil-sounding names and roots far stronger than your total body muscle mass combined.

I'm talking about getting rid of weeds here, the kind of weeds that are so hard to get rid of that you try very hard to convince yourself that there is some plausible way to work their existence into your garden plans. I tried this bit of delusion with a couple of thistles that implanted themselves mysteriously a few years ago: "Ah," thinks I to myself, "the thistle really is a very architectural plant. And its flower is actually quite attractive. Perhaps I will allow them to remain here where nothing else grows anyway, as a statement of gardening whimsy, a bit of quirkiness." Ha! That little experiment led to the formulation of one of my gardening mottoes: never allow the noxious thistle to set seed within sight of my neighborhood!

I've never resorted to a chemical weedkiller before. Ask anybody - I'm Ms. Natural herself. Would never even consider using anything more potent than marigold plantings, tansy, and the occasional strong stream of water to knock off bug pests. Certainly would never put - gasp! - chemicals on our (roll eyeballs heavenwards) Holy Sacred Mother Earth!

Well, this year I decided to get real. Not everywhere, but just in a few key spots where I had always suffered weeds to grow ad lib before - in and along the driveway, where previously was nothing but a wasteyard along an ugly concrete retaining wall. This year I decided, first of all, to make a vibrant mosaic design on that wall, and paint it a rich Mediterranean blue. That done, it was immediately clear that to do justice to my creative work of art (snort!), the rattiest of the weeds would have to be cleared away. And there's also the new cute little VW Beetle we just got (you can read my review of that, if you want) - such an adorable little car deserves a more spiffed-up place to park, doesn't it? So I went after the worst of the weeds. Hah! It would be easier to plumb water out of the stone than to pull or dig those wretched things out of the rotted, crumbling blacktop covered with about 1/2 inch of decayed leaves and old lilac trimmings.

I may be stubborn, and I may be a committed organic gardener, but I am not stupid; in the increasing wisdom of my middle years, I decided to just see if this Round-Up stuff that everyone raves about and apparently sprays by the gallon would do the job. After all, my sister-in-law touts its praises highly, and she's a good person, a practicing Buddhist even, and if it's good enough for her karma it probably wouldn't hurt mine, right?

So I bought some, the ready-to-spray kind (it's also available in a concentrate and, I believe, a super-concentrate), figuring that I didn't want to mess with the stuff any more than I had to. And I only wanted a small amount, for starters, just enough to try it on those cursed driveway weeds. It cost - well, I can't really remember, but maybe just under 10 bucks, on sale. I wouldn't have bought it if it had cost much more than that, since even $10 is a major splurge on our current budget these days. (In fact, there is no garden budget; it comes out of my personal allowance, in case anybody could possibly care.)

I sprayed. Round-Up is a glyphosate weedkiller that works systemically on the plant. It is taken up by the plant's tissues, through the foliage, and travels throughout the plant itself, right down to the root. It withers the foliage, it kills the root, and eventually the plant is dead. I believe that it's recommended that it works most effectively in mid-summer, when the plant's rate of growth is high and its "metabolism" or whatever it's called in plants is active. It will kill whatever whatever plants it touches - in other words, it doesn't differentiate between the most foul and determined crabgrass or pigweed and your Great Aunt Minnie's prized rosebush that she brought over as her only possession from the Old Country inside her underwear 150 years ago. So you can't just go spraying it around indiscriminately. I made a little fence out of old pizza boxes (which have accumulated to the point that I could build an entire summer house for a family of five out of them!) to shield my desirable plants from my undesirable weeds, and this seemed to work just fine.

Other "tips" for use:
Don't spray on a windy day. It should be as still as possible, so it doesn't drift or blow where you don't want it.
Time it so you'll have at least 2 hours before it rains. I guess that's how long it needs to get absorbed by the plants' foliage.
It is most effective in hot sunny weather. Guess it bakes in faster that way or something.
Wear protective (disposable, preferably) gloves, and don't get the stuff on your clothes, shoes, etc. Probably the prudent person would wear a mask while spraying - I'm not that prudent, nor was my spraying that extensive.

This type of weedkiller doesn't live in the ground, so they claim. So theoretically, at least, you can cultivate immediately in the soils where the yucky weeds were. Personally, this is the claim I'm most skeptical about. I didn't exactly test this out, nor do I plan to really push it. But that's what is supposed to make this stuff so safe to use.

The other thing I can't help being concerned about is the general issue of what kind of effect this kind of product has on human beings. They say it's relatively "safe". I'm not at all sure about that - chemicals of any kind just aren't that safe, and in most cases the risk:benefit ratio, for my own purposes at least, comes out on the side of caution; I almost never feel that the hazards to man, beast, and atmosphere warrant the use of noxious stuffs. But anyway, just this once, just for this one little patch, I decided to go ahead. I will say that after I sprayed, when I was working in the same area on some other garden job, the smell, not egregious to begin with when you spray it, became really nauseating - I was working in the direct sun, in mid-afternoon, and I think the combination of sun & poison kind of worked me up to a good solid yucky feeling.

Oh, I forgot to tell you what happens after you spray it - this was the part I wasn't at all clear about ahead of time. First, you wait. Myself, I only had the patience to wait about 48 hours, and then I just had to go pull the weakened, pathetic skeletons of their former weedly selves out. My garden encyclopedia says it might take a matter of weeks for the weed to wither away completely. The bottle suggests a similar time span (1-2 weeks, I think). Presumably, if you just leave them alone, in a couple of weeks they will have disappeared from view, but I'm not absolutely clear on this point. Well, I'm a proactive kind of girl, and I saw that after 48 hours the tops of the weeds were all nasty and brown and dead-looking, with big chunky holes in the leaves and everything, so I decided to just go yank 'em out. Figured the root couldn't have much tenacity by that point, and I couldn't be looking at that shrivelly mess for long. They came out easy as pie. Poor yucky old things - I almost felt guilty!

Oh, face it: I did feel guilty, no "almost" about it. But the weeds were gone, with an absolute minimum of effort on my part. Probably less than 2 minutes to spray the whole area, and a few more minutes lifting them out by their dead stalks. Unbelievable, compared to the unsuccessful hours and hours I'd spent previously digging and tugging and teasing out hidden, twisted root systems, only to inevitably leave chunks of root behind from which the weeds grew back stronger than ever. I'd always considered that as far as the weeds were concerned, these unsuccessful attempts at removal served much like a growth-inspiring pruning - you know how you break off the top of a dandelion, and when it comes back there are two crowns where before there was one?

Well, Round-Up seems to have worked. So far my brain hasn't rotted, I haven't grown any extra body parts, and if I've begun to glow in the dark no one has mentioned it to me. I don't think I'll use it very often, or very freely, because it just goes against my natural grain to resort to such trickery against any plant. I can't say that this product is "harmless" - clearly, it can't be "harmless". Even pouring boiling water on your unwanted weeds isn't without risks. Most of the time, in most cultivated areas of your garden, you can keep weeding to a manageable chore (frankly, I like weeding - it's very meditative, very intimate down there face to face with the plants) by mulching, being attentive to what's coming up in your ground, and dealing with problems promptly. But for those places where "regular" weeding just doesn't do the trick - pavement cracks, driveways, patches where nothing but nasty weeds grows- I will probably continue to use Round-Up, cautiously and conflictedly as my ventures into the "chemicals" department of my local Agway may be.



Recommended: Yes