Last week I mentioned how difficult, and costly, it was for the Heirloom Orchardist to keep his fields free of weeds. How difficult was it? Without the benefit of some indiscriminate herbicide, how invasive were those weeds? Well, consider White Weed. The following comes from the July 6, 1835 issue of Yankee Farmer:
"We see that some of our brethren are calling attention, thus early in the season, to this troublesome weed, and we would also join them, heart and hand in the clamor. In some towns it has got a rank hold, to the exclusion of much better vegetables, for wherever it gets settled, it will in time kill out all other grass."
White Weed? What's that? F. Schuler Mathews, in his 1902 Field Book described it as "The commonest of all weeds of the field and wayside, often called Farmer's Curse, yet a prime favorite with children and artists!" (Well, Mathews was an artist, so perhaps it's good to get his point of view.) Farmer's Curse? A favorite with artists? What is this stuff?
It's the Common Daisy. Good ol' Ox-Eye. And today, it's hard for me to believe that it is such a bad invasive. Even Neltje Blanchan expressed a sympathetic view on the plant in her book "Natures Garden": "Myriads and myriads of daisies, whitening our fields as if a belated blizzard had covered them with a snowy mantle in June, fill the farmer with dismay, the flower-lover with rapture."
I think the 18th and 19th century Heirloom Orchardist would chuckle at Neltje, and break out his can of Round-up... if he could. But he couldn't. So he had to attack it with what we now call an organic, sustainable method. Here's one suggestion, from the "Illustrated Annual Register of Rural affairs, for 1864":
"One of the most successful examples we have ever met with of the destruction of this weed is on the farm of Isaac Garrett, of Upper Darby, near Philadelphia. This troublesome weed whitens the fields in profuse abundance in that region: but on this farm not a solitary weed could be found, after a diligent search. The following is the mode for its extirpation: Two successive crops of corn are raised on the ground, both well manured and thoroughly cultivated and hoed; this treatment removes nearly all the weeds. The subsequent dense crop of clover smothers most of the remainder, and the few scattering ones left are pulled up by hand. On another well managed farm in the neighborhood no daisies were to be seen where the land was heavily seeded to clover; but where a strip had partially failed, numbers of them were visible."
The above doesn't seem to put enough emphasis on the "thoroughly cultivated and hoed" part of the process. It would seem to me that it's pretty critical, no matter what you're planting. But I find it interesting that the icing on the cake is to finish-up with a field "heavily seeded to clover." Do you remember my Spring post on clover in my lawn? Clover is good stuff. In this case, I imagine it would help smother the last remaining traces of daisy seedlings, as well as replenish the nitrogen in a soil that's been depleted by "two successive crops of corn". Today's organic farmer/gardeners will find pleasure in this. The Heirloom Orchardist didn't practice sustainable methods because they are good for the earth. He did it 'cause he had to. What other methods were there?
