I stood there in the aisle of the hardware store, wanting to buy the herbicide. Really and truly. There were so many weeds in my garden this year that the vision of some quick chemical fix was so, so tempting.
Snow cover that had kept my perennials comfy cozy throughout January and February did the same for the weeds, and I was astounded when I saw all the pigweed, knotweed, chickweed, violets, feverfew, pellitory, dayflowers and oxalis charging through my flower beds and lawn come May. (This was the year that taught me what the "mixed" part of the phrase "mixed blessing" actually means.) Note that I didn't mention dandelions. A couple 15-minute forays into the lawn with the dandelion weeder each spring keeps them fairly well in check.
So I shuffled about, read a few labels and pondered the choices. But when push came to shove, I could neither push nor shove myself to pick one. I kept thinking about groundwater and runoff and dead microorganisms in the soil and just couldn't do it.
So I went home where I spent a certain portion of the summer down on my knees, not praying but preying on the resident weeds. After clearing an area, I mulched, using grass clippings, my own compost or mulch that I purchased from one of the city's best-kept secrets: E-Z Tree at 71st and Dorchester. The Saturn groaned one sunny Saturday afternoon as its trunk and backseat were loaded with ten 35-pound bags of mulch. I groaned too as I unloaded the car and slid, slithered, dragged, lifted, carried and otherwise schlepped the bags to the once violet-infested paths in the daylily bed and the hosta garden.
Was it worth it? Of course. Or as that TV commercial has it: priceless.
Still, it was work, and so in mid-summer, just about the time my faith could have started to waver, I toddled over to the Museum of Science and Industry to have a look at the Smart Home exhibit. Made of recycled materials, sustainably harvested bamboo and ipe wood, powered by the sun, crowned with a Green Grid green roof, and surrounded by a bounteous garden of vegetables and flowering prairie natives, the Smart Home is a fully operational 3-story house and garden that demonstrates in every inch of its being what a "green home" is all about. More than just inspirational, seeing the Smart Home is like attending a tent revival meeting that fills you with the spirit and sends you home a true believer. (I went home deeply glad that I had kept the faith and refrained from that herbicide purchase.)
"I have seen the future and it works," once said American writer Lincoln Steffens after a trip to the newly revolutionized Russia in 1921. Were he alive today, he would surely say the same about the Smart Home. Believe me, folks. This is a must-see.
