06/04/2024
The other day my dear colleague in healing our ecological relationships- -asked me what I think the proliferation of thistle in the garden we co-tend at .rising is trying to tell us. A wonderful question that I’ve been thinking about ever since. My initial response was that possibly there’s a deep compaction issue- plants with robust taproots often show up to help us with this. But tonight I was pulling some thistle at my home farm and I had a slightly different thought. Maybe thistle shows up like a friend who knows how to ask the probing, thorny questions when you’re making sus choices. Not to tell you that you’ve done something wrong or to fix things for you, just to ask the questions you maybe haven’t been so diligent about asking yourself. Not “Your soil’s compacted again 🙄” or “Here. Let me fix your compacted soil.”, but more like “Are you sure what you’ve been doing hasn’t compacted the soil?”
In both gardens, the thistle is showing up after a period significant (thoughtful !) disturbance. Disturbance isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there can be negative consequences, like compaction, depending which methods are used. I know that the methods I used were unlikely to cause compaction, but the thistle didn’t. All she knew is that she’d been dormant in the seed bank and now she wasn’t. Cause for concern. So she raised the question.
This evening as the sun set in a stormy sky and the first fireflies of the season flickered nearby I tested out how difficult it’d be to hand pull the thistle in an area I’m prepping for sweet potatoes- my tentative response to the thistle’s question. Most slipped easily from the ground, hardly leaving a sign they had been there at all. Even the tougher ones weren’t a struggle. The thistle in this picture has a taproot about 18” long. I pulled it with a single hand that was already holding three other pulled thistle plants. We’re doing a-okay compaction-wise over here, but I’m glad I took the question seriously anyway. I think the thistle feels respected now.
