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Dandelions, mulch make deadly combo

The Sunday Column

It is springtime, and the reward for living through the winter is the rebirth of the world around us.

While springtime is a beautiful miracle, for me, it is often a very confusing time.

One of the first things that greet us in the spring is the appearance of the innocent-looking dandelion. The dandelion has a perfectly formed bright, yellow flower surrounded by large green leaves. Its flowers appear just in time to welcome in the Easter season, adding an appropriate color, as well.

My grandfather used to pick the dandelion and make wine, and the leaves of the plant make a delicious salad when covered with a hot bacon dressing. Dandelions need no care and reseed themselves each year. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

However, in our quest for the perfect world, the first thing I do each spring is buy weed killer to kill the “free” dandelion. No more free wine and no more free salads.

Of course, when the dandelions and other miscellaneous “green” weeds are dead, I have to add fertilizer the lawn to make the grass green up and fill in the holes where the dandelions and weeds used to be.

It only makes sense that if the grass is fertilized, the grass grows faster, which means instead of fishing in my spare time, I have to mow the lawn and not be sipping on dandelion wine or munching on a dandelion salad if I had simply left everything alone in the first place.

Next, I find myself at the local greenhouse each weekend where my wife buys “flats” of various flowers. For those of you who have limited experience in gardening, “flats” of flowers is like instead of buying milk by the quart, half gallon or gallon going straight to the dairy and buying it by the tanker truck.

Needless to say, all of these flowers have to be planted, watered, fertilized, divided and transplanted. I forgot to mention that on average, about one-third of them die in the process or get attacked by some tiny bug, all of which means another trip to the greenhouse for more “flats.” All of this work and money just to add some color to the landscape, which the dandelion supplied for free before I was forced to kill it.

The other demon that rears its ugly head in the spring is the word — mulch. For many people, placing mulch in their flower beds and shrubby means buying three or four bags of mulch at the local hardware store. I’m not making fun of anyone who buys their mulch by the bag, but to put it in perspective, at the end of the mulching season, I normally have removed more than four bags of mulch from under my fingernails.

In my case, getting mulch means hooking up the trailer to my truck, hauling and shoveling about 50 cubic yards of mulch at about $30 a yard if I get a bulk price. Now that might not be bad if it was concrete that once you put it down, it stays there, but mulch has a nasty habit of rotting up by the next spring. My wife and I have this discussion every year: I want to buy cheaper mulch with bigger chunks that hopefully will last for two years, but she prefers a finer mulch that admittedly looks better when put down but does not last as long. For us, it has become a yearly circular conversation as we go round and round. However, it always ends the same — with me hauling and shoveling mulch sometime until the end of June or mid-July, just in time to start morning and evening watering of all the flowers so they don’t die.

At the same time, somewhere in my yard is a dandelion that resisted all the weed killers I applied and remains straight and tall with it green leaves and bright yellow flower oblivious to the ongoing drought. I know I will never win this battle. I just wish I was smart enough not to continue to try.

John Kasun writes from Duncansville home with a green lawn and no dandelion wine.

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