Seedy surprise

A week ago Saturday I mentioned that a few blades of grass had been spotted in the front yard sheet mulching.  They were removed, but more followed, many more.  The same happened in the sheet mulch designated for strawberries in the back yard.  Hmmm.   The grass was appearing only in the newer areas.  The difference between the newer and older sections in the front was obvious because the first had been covered with the straw Angela gave me and the later portion had been covered with Granum straw the - colours were a little different.  The first compost I put down must have been finished, the second had viable weed seeds.  I felt a bit of a fool.

That foolish feeling went away in a hurry after I carefully pulled up a couple of blades to examine the roots (Please don't be quackgrass!) and discovered a brown shell at the bases of the stems.  Pulled up a few more, same thing.  That's when I remembered pulling apart another Granum bale a few days earlier and finding intact wheat heads (and recoiling in horror).
This changes everything.  Instead of being a poor sheet mulcher, I am suddenly a wheat farmer, looking forward to amber waves of grain on our windswept front yard.  So it wasn't long before I was rooting through that rejected bale to find those troublesome golden wheat berries.  They were distributed  around the bush beans, which are coming along nicely, and we'll see what happens.  This is awesome.

Besides the beans and volunteer wheat, radishes and garden cress planted in the sheet mulch are showing promise.  The herbs are slow, as expected, and the lettuce mysteriously disappeared overnight.  Slug?

Self-seeding is vastly more pleasant when done by some plants than others, for instance, sunflowers instead of hairy goat's beard.  We have a few sunflowers in the front garden.  Don't remember how they got there.  Maybe I planted them before realizing that sunflowers, at least the ones on our property, always face east.  We get a nice view from the house, but it's a bit rude to people passing on the sidewalk.  The soil is poor and the stalks are thin and stunted, yet they manage to produce seeds and provide a generation for the next summer.  The same happens back in the alley, where they were once planted for privacy and maybe to  show a friendly face to people in the alley - a respectable number of pet walkers and other pedestrians, as well as motorists.  These flowers self-seeded also, but into a much more nurturing environment than their relatives on the street side of the house.  Several have reached 7 feet and the tallest was measured at 9.5 feet on Friday.  Good bean poles for next summer.  Delightful for the time being.

Our other crop of volunteers is the lawn parsnips.  In 2009 we allowed a 2008 parsnip to grow into a huge flower.  It was over 5 feet tall when it blew over in a storm, sending it's seeds far and wide.  The lawn is full of them.  Not much good for eating mind you, since the ground is hard, dry clay, but they could probably produce seeds for us in a pinch.  Some of the errant seeds landed in the garden, though.  One escaped weeding and grew unfettered at the very edge, reaching down beside and then underneath the cinder block border.  It was a huge amount of work to uproot and our biggest catch of that year.

Sometimes I think the good seed surprises make up for the weeds.  Nature can be fair and balanced.