Strange Spring

This spring is the same — and profoundly different — as past springs. We did sharpen blades, charge batteries, and begin another year (our 12th) mowing lawns. But we also outfitted our crew with gloves and masks and stored a big bottle of hand sanitizer in each dedicated vehicle.

Garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, spreads by seed and is not a source of food for wildlife — but can be for people.

Garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, is not a source of food for local wildlife — but can be for people.

Like every year, we charge our batteries with renewable energy. But this year, each battery also gets a daily wipe down with an alcohol-based disinfectant.

And like past springs, the slight hill on my corner lot is overrun with garlic mustard, considered a noxious weed by the USDA and all 46 states where it occurs. But this year, I’ve started eating the darn stuff!

From roots to flowers, the whole plant is edible and nutritious, with a payload of vitamins A, B, C, and E along with calcium, potassium, iron, manganese, and best of all, omega-3 fatty acids. This essential nutrient, also found in fish, is helpful in preventing and managing heart disease.

Garlic mustard leaves, stems, and flowers help fill out a spinach and sage  pasta topping.

Garlic mustard leaves, stems, and flowers help fill out a spinach and sage pasta topping.

While garlic mustard is edible, I wouldn’t call it delicious. I found the leaves to be more bitter than garlicky. But when stir-fried with spinach and sage leaves and served over pasta, it made itself right at home. Just like the masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer sitting here and there around the house.

A strange spring indeed. Embracing my invasives while keeping my distance from friends and neighbors.

The Fight of our Lives

I doubt I would’ve started Solar Mowing if carbon dioxide wasn’t a major cause of climate change. The smells and noise made by lawn mowers, trimmers, and blowers might not even bother me that much.

carbon-emissions-coalCigarette smoke didn’t bother me before I understood how deadly it is to smokers — and to nonsmokers. After seeing lung cancer up close, I can barely stand the smell of a lit cigarette. It smells like disease and death. And gas-powered lawn equipment, to me, smells like a planet burning.

Climate change is the issue that will define our time and our children’s time. Which is why I want you to know about a movie premiering this Sunday, September 7 at 7 pm. Disruption, about the “science, politics, and movement around climate change,” can be seen for free at these and other venues.

1.  Butler Conference Room, American University, Wash., DC
2.  A private home in Takoma Park, MD
3.  Bar Pilar, 14th & T, NW, Wash., DC

Watch the movie trailer here.

ClimateMarchLogoTwo weeks later, you may want to attend what organizers hope will be the “largest public demonstration against climate change in history.”

The People’s Climate March will be held in New York City, September 21, 2014, starting at 11:30. 

Do I think replacing 100 or 500 gas-powered lawn mowers with clean mowers will prevent glaciers in West Antarctica from collapsing or storms worldwide from worsening? In a word, no.

But as Disruption makes clear, climate change is the fight of our lives. And like many of you, I’m a fighter.

If a Milkweed is a Bully, is it still Beneficial?

At first, I thought morning glory (Ipomoea L.) was twisting over and through the swamp rose (Rosa palustris), a Maryland native growing in my rain garden. It had those unmistakable (or in this case, mistakable) heart-shaped leaves, and morning glory has been creeping everywhere since I planted three seeds 18 years ago. In these parts, the annual morning glory is a definite perennial.

Creeping noiselessly over, under, and through a swamp rose is the poorly behaved honey vine and its dangling milky pod.

Creeping over and through a swamp rose is the beneficial bully honeyvine.

But then, I spotted milky pods — and the garden plot thickened. :)

Turns out my swamp rose is in the grip of honeyvine (Cynanchum leave), a member of the milkweed family, that not only attracts bees, birds, and butterflies, including monarchs for which it serves as host to its young, it’s drought-tolerant and deer-resistant. Oh, and people hate it.

Because it’s a bully. I’m convinced that plants are every bit as complicated as people.

An 11"-by-11" painting made with pigments from  Rosa multiflora, Mahonia bealei, Lonicera maackii and weed soot on paper from Morus alba. Acer platanus

An 11″-by-11″ painting made, in part, with multiflora rosa (Rosa multiflora), bush honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), and white mulberry (Morus alba).

And while we’re on the subject of invasives … we are, aren’t we? … Washington Post illustrator and volunteer land steward, Patterson Clark pulls invasives in mass quantities from public and private lands in Washington, DC. Then he does something remarkable: He processes all that noxious plant material into pigment and paper and makes art.

You can see Clark’s weed work at the Atrium Gallery in McLean, VA, from September 11-October 25.

And so I have to ask: Mr. Clark, do you walk by honeyvine or turn it into art?