As if the brown smoke from Canada was not enough, after the rains comes natures second growth…Weeds. Most of them are green and a lot of them like to hide under the leaves and blossoms of the good stuff you planted and nurtured until mid-July. So it is time to get down there and pick out the bad stuff to keep the good stuff growing and looking beautiful. You may well have a weed story from your yard. But when it comes to weeds the biggest ones are out in the western deserts. Tumble weeds like your green invader are natural plants the originally came from Russia. Not intentionally it turned out.  They were the pollution in bags of wheat and oats that were to be planted on the big farms out West. Tumbleweeds are unique because they start as just flat green spidery arms that do not seem to bother anyone. As they grow the branches develop into a ball shape, like a big beach ball. The fun starts after the harvest season when these big green balls dry out and break loose from the ground and become a rolling army across the open land.

If you think you have weeds…Dick Wilde, 73, lives in a special spot. He is at the end of the prairie wheat fields and backed up by the Rocky mountain foothills. This makes it a great place for tumbleweeds to pile up, blown off the flat land and stuck between his and the neighbor’s house. His home in Washington state has been buried under a 15-foot mountain of tumbleweed and he is worried that the bone-dry stacks can catch fire and torch his home. Wilde added the town’s tumbleweed troubles this year are the worst in more than 20 years. The picture shows the weeds stacked up to the gutters of his house and him shoulder deep trying to push them away.

Trooper Chris Thorson shared a video (below) of Department of Transportation workers making their way through the piles of tumbleweeds in the dark. State Route 240 was closed in both directions near West Richland, Wash. Several drivers had to be rescued by snowplows. The tumbleweeds were piled between 20 and 30 feet high in some places. Five cars and one 18-wheel semi-truck where trapped in the tumbleweeds. No injuries were reported. Thorson said Wednesday that troopers found one abandoned car that was trapped in the tumbleweeds at daylight, but no one was inside. Be brave and stand up to these monsters as if they were as harmless as a houseplant. Though they aren’t, to be clear; tumbleweeds are the Devil’s cotton candy, and should be destroyed on sight.

Weedy funny comments

I was busy in my garden and the neighbor looked over the fence and Asked: “What are you doing?”
I said, “I’m putting all my plants in alphabetical order.”
She replied “Really? I don’t know how you find the time!”
“Oh that’s easy,” I said, “Its right next to the sage.”

I saw a sign that said, “Slow men at work.” I thought how awesome it was that the “Slow children at play” will grow up and find meaningful employment.

When my wife starts to sing, I always go outside and do some garden work,
so our neighbors can see there’s no domestic violence going on.

What do you call a plastic bag moving in the wind?
An American tumbleweed.

July 20th Birthdays

1971 – Sandra Oh, 1993 – Alycia Debnam-Carey, 1992 – Paige Hurd , 1976 – Judy Greer

1947 – Carlos Santana, 1996 – Joey Bragg, 1964 – Dean Winters, 1956 – Dwayne Wayans

Weeds gone wild