Love Thy Neighbor…
…even when he sprays poison all over the plants (weeds) along the edge line and splashes it all over the base of the clump of Bee Balm you’ve been nursing along, trying to coax a bloom out of, for four years. Love him because you don’t know him. Love him because he’s in the same boat you’re in, with two house payments and this ridiculously expensive home he built and can’t seem to sell. Love him because he’s just trying to make the world a better place. With less weeds. Or something.
The brown, burnt scruff you see behind the glorious (finally!) blooming Bee Balm was once a lovely stand of Goldenrod, the same one that last year played host to what looked like possibly every aphid in Northeast Ohio. My bad for planting Comfrey and Bee Balm right there by the rocks in a weak, unfinished attempt at getting some kind of an edge garden happening. I had big plans for Bee Balm tea for the winter, but won’t be harvesting any of it now. Will it be safe to use if I move it and let it live in healthy soil, far, far away from the killing drops of Round Up for a few years?
Here’s where I want to wax philosphical about city living vs. country living, but hell…we had issues out in the boonies too. We just couldn’t see the neighbors in their bathroom.
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
July 20th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
ugh, i just discovered what that weird smell i smelled a couple days ago was…weed killer sprayed, yes! right along our fence line. i have made faces about it but not sure what else. each and every one of our neighbors–east, west and north–has been out and about with the stuff. i watched with sad horror as a mama robin built a nest out of the deadened weeds from the east house the next day. i have not seen baby robins.
July 21st, 2007 at 10:01 am
Argggghhh! Remember when my father-in-law sprayed Roundup in the area where my chickens ranges?
I’ve got bee balm in red and purple if you want some
xox
July 21st, 2007 at 10:59 am
I had bee balm at our hold house, not here, and it was NEVER that beautiful! That’s just gorgeous!
July 22nd, 2007 at 11:38 am
I am growing bee balm right now for the first time ever. It just bloomed and I love it! Such a wild looking flower.
I think if you plant it out of the round up range and don’t harvest it for a year or two you’ll be perfectly safe.
I just hate that people use that stuff at all. Ever. so evil.