Today's Catch

Dandelions. This time I'm not talking about kid #2. No, I'm talking about weeds.

Or are they? I'm a bit ambivalent about it actually. On the one hand, they're beautiful, bold, vibrant, lovely.

And they only get better when they go to seed, transforming into beautiful globes of puffy, fluffy, silken-thread seedlings. A gust of wind or a child's enthusiastic "blow out the candles" puff sends then sailing into the spring-turning-summertime sky. Dandelions are a joy . . .

until they pop up in my yard. Despite all my nostalgia and affection for dandelions, I can't stand seeing them in my lawn. I despise how their leaves spread out and choke the grass around them. I hate how they look once the fluffy seeds have blown away. Yuck. And when they wilt, their stems look like gigantic, deflated worms. Ick.

Last year, as I dug up dandelions I threw them into my trusty wagon. Eventually I filled it all the way up. I had a lot of them, and I expected that (as a reward for such hard work) I'd see fewer in my yard this year.

It wasn't to be. Maybe the problem was that last year, I didn't start digging up dandelions until May. May. By that time they had gone through several seed cycles, and of course, those seeds landed in my yard and paved the way for this, my daily catch:

Almost daily for nearly a month, I have gone out on every not-raining day to dig up any dandelion in sight. They hide until their bright bloom gives them away. This year, I'm trying to dig up every bloom before it has the chance to go to seed. And what you see in the picture; that's a typical day's catch.

Sooner or later I'll run out of dandelions to dig up, and when I do, I'll move on to one of the other (2 dozen odd) varieties of Missouri weeds that have found a home they don't deserve in my yard.