It got away from me this year: buttonweed, also known as common mallow also known as Malva neglecta. I’m pretty sure that Malva neglecta is latin for, if you neglect it, it will take over the world. We have one more phrase for the plant at our house, but it involves swear words. While I don’t mind swear words, I believe that the duty of teaching you or your family members important new swear words and phrases belongs to the parent or individual that is in charge of plumbing repairs in your house. I shall not overstep.
Back to the mighty freekin’ buttonweed. When it first showed up at my house several years ago it was near the barn. The seeds likely came in some hay. It’s a pretty broadleaf plant with light pink/purple flowers. What’s not to like? So I let it go. I didn’t know that it’s tap root grows thick and about 8 feet (okay, maybe only 8 inches) deep, making it as hard to pull up as a full-grown weeping willow. I didn’t know that the cute button shaped seed pods produce a bazillion seeds in each pod. (Okay, I counted them. There are only about 15 seeds in each button shaped pod. But they are very fertile, and I swear every single one germinates.) I also didn’t know that the horses won’t eat the plant, so it has a strong advantage in fields and paddocks. Heck, even our goats didn’t eat them. Oddly, however, if you look it up, humans can eat the seed pods. Somehow, I’m not interested in trying them.
A friend with the same plant in her yard told me I had to keep up with it and pull it and pull it and pull it some more. I focused on the horse pens in the last couple years, and there are fewer struggling plants in there now. But I didn’t focus on the chicken pen, or the yard. Apparently chickens do not eat buttonweed either. I even tried Round-up on the plants once, and I hate herbicides. It briefly wilted the leaves, then the plants bounced back as robust as ever.
This year I had old growth and second growth patches of the nasty weed in my yard. In the chicken pen where we dump the compost, it grew to knee-high, and the branches were strong as rope and created a tripping hazard. With this year’s wet spring the patches have outcompeted the grass in many areas of the yard. It was a monoculture of flowering buttonweed. I was overwhelmed, with seed pods and flowers everywhere. Dried out pods, green pods, about to pop pods. Finally, I could no longer avoid weeding it.
I decided I needed to follow good weed management practices, by not just pulling and leaving the plant on the ground to hopefully die as I usually do. I needed to pull up not only each plant, but also to destroy the seeds. If it wasn’t so dry, I would burn them. I have placed some of the plants in deep buckets of water. This is a technique where you let noxious weeds rot while submersed in water. You know the process is complete when your bucket of rotten weeds smells like a dead animal and the neighbors start to complain. Then, theoretically, you can use the putrid smelling weed water to fertilize lawns and gardens, and in the process make your whole yard smell like a dead animal. Even with this fine and sustainable technique, we had way more weeds than available buckets. Who knew there was so much biomass in old-growth buttonweed?
We then used plastic feedbags and dog food bags to stuff full of buttonweed. I worked at weeding for two days with short-bursts of weeding time. I ran out of available bags before running out of weeds and had to beg for more feedbags from my neighbor. Currently I have six bags full, and I’m not sure what we will do with the bags of weeds, since they will overwhelm our garbage can. Maybe I’ll let the weeds and seeds dry out, and burn them with the pinecones this fall, when it’s finally safe to burn. Maybe I’ll try filling the bags with water to make some more stinky rotting fertilizer water. Maybe bit by bit and bag by bag I’ll find room in the garbage can.
For now, I’ve caught up on the backlog of buttonweed pulling. But I know they will re-appear in the spring and wouldn’t be surprised if they start sprouting again this winter. They are that kind of grudge-holding plant. I imagine the seeds are long-lived, and I’m sure that the bits of the taproot that didn’t pull out will come back to life, like little zombie plants. I’m sure next year I won’t let them get so out of control. Oh, cripes and criminy, I forgot about the weeds in the chicken pen. They are so tall that the chickens get lost in the buttonweed jungle. Plus, I’m out of feedbags again. And my hands are aching from pulling up the plants. Oh well. The sun is shining, the weather has cooled, and the seed pods are bursting. Time to pull some more.
Michelle Eames 