New players on the weed team put defense on alert

The weeds in my garden are like the best-known players on a rival team. I’ve faced off against them long enough to know their best plays, when they’ll show up and how to keep them in check.

So when new players on the weed team show up in my garden, I’m on alert. And there are two that have shown up in large quantities this year.

The first is motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca), which made its presence known in early spring and has started popping up in mass clusters around the garden.

Its square stem is a sure sign of its membership in the mint family, and my hackles go up any time a plant’s common name has “mother” in it, as it usually means it’s an excellent reproducer.

Not does it spread via shallow rhizomatous roots, but it also has prickly seeds that form along the length of the stem that stick to clothing and animal fur.

It prefers poor soil and often colonizes in open areas where there is little competition, although I’ve found it intermingled in carex and other perennials, which seems to suggest it isn’t all that fussy.

If there is an upside to this weed, it’s that it has a number of herbal and medicinal uses, which is no good to me but may be to someone else, and it serves as a good food source for bees.

The other new weed that’s shown up in force is a sneaky one, masquerading as an innocent little bit of grass but hiding a dark secret underground.

And I knew I was in trouble when I shared it on social media in the hope of getting help identifying it and was besieged by people telling me it was yellow nutsedge (Cyperus esculentus). Given the trauma-induced notes of condolence that followed, I’ve got my work cut out for me with it.

At the surface, yellow nutsedge appears as a bright green, grassy plant with shiny leaves. As it grows, its triangular stem becomes more apparent.

A proliferation of a weed in specific areas can be a good clue as to what might be happening in the soil, and the nutsedge showing up in my garden is an indication of areas that might have compacted, poor draining soil, which makes sense in an area was the recent victim of a trenching project involving heavy machinery.

I’ve learned that it’s not difficult to pull nutsedge, which should have been my first clue that it wasn’t the right thing to do. That’s because this sneaky weedy assassin, which is as likely to show up in the lawn as it is in garden beds, is hiding an underground superpower — little tubers called nutlets.

Digging at least 8 inches deep is the correct way to manage nutsedge in beds, and improving the health of the lawn can help it compete with germinating nutsedge seeds, along with selective herbicide application.

It’s pretty likely that both of these new weed players in my yard will be around for awhile. I just hope I don’t get to know them as well as the rest of the weed roster.