It’s hot and moist again here in South Florida…the kind of weather where the air permeates your body with inescapable heat: the sun, the high temperature, the humidity that fills your lungs with sticky warmth and you can smell everything in a 3-D sort of way if that were possible.

My outdoor garden is overrun now. Bugs are an afterthought, it’s the weeds that have run amuck and overwhelmed my spirit as I entered my humble garden today after being absent from it for only a couple of days. Whereas my kindred gardening souls in northern latitudes are starting to enjoy sweet harvests from their gardens, my plots are fighting to stay alive against the relentless sub-tropical waves of warmth–a haven breeding ground for countless weeds.

It’s easy to write off these invasive weeds as a waste of plant energies and yet the study of horticulture has found that some weeds are beneficial for our soil as they end up leaving things that weren’t there before. You can conduct an internet search on the subject to reach links like this: http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/organicweeds/weed_information/weedtype.php?id=-2

But we can’t easily do the same research when it comes to the weeds that creep in and threaten to choke our personal lives.  It’s mid-year already and where do we stand with what we set out to do in 2012?  Perhaps you had plans to tackle and it may seem that circumstances and relationships have taken you down in unexpected ways.  Hopefully there are many positive outcomes in some of these instances.

It’s overwhelming to know where to start weeding whether we’re speaking of your plants outside or your spirit inside.  Just start picking up the one closest to you, the one that is hurting you the most at this very moment. The important thing is to not run away and avoid it because that will only give the weeds more power over our plants, our life.

In my garden, my gated entrance has what my brother calls “torpedo grass” invading aggressively: I just put on my gloves and started grabbing at the grass with more gusto than calculated effort.  At my desk today I picked up the first clipped article on my massive pile of papers and wrote the letter that went with it to send to the appropriate family member in snail mail mode.  In my heart I focused on the refrain stuck on rewind and addressed that issue to the best of my ability.

The consistent thing about weeds is that although we may eradicate them for a time, they will pop up again.  They may be the same ones or different ones altogether–either way, each time we deal with them we learn and grow.  Our physical gardens also mature in that many secondary generations of plants will develop stronger strains to deal with the difficulties causes by the invasive species.  The goal for our personal weeds are also to be stronger the next time around and maybe learn what we didn’t see before.

Good luck weeding this summer!

R.V.S.Bean