Matthew 13:24-30: A Very Disappointing Morning.

This morning I decided to use my workout time to move wood chips. It is a nice, easy recovery activity after the harder workouts of Monday and Tuesday, and, let’s face it. The garden needs it. There is nothing the farm needs right now more than a few days of dedicated wheelbarrow work.

For no particular reason I decided to concentrate efforts on the garden paths. I think I was thinking in terms of suppressing some of the bind weed that is taking over the paths.

After 4-5 loads I happened to look at my new winter greens, (swiss chard in several different varieties, along with early brussels sprouts) I saw something odd.

One section of the row, about 12 feet long, was being taken over by some kind of weed. If you look at the picture above you will see along the side the saw-lobed leaves of the daikon radishes along the sides; the silvery green leaves of the brussels sprouts in the middle; towards the top round to oval leaves with red and yellow stalks of the Swiss chard; and towards the bottom the thin, thready straggly leaves of German chamomile. So far so good. But what are those fern shaped leaves dominating the lower left corner of the picture?

Fern-like leaves and a tap root…

Purple streaks and dots on the stem…

Which is soft and hollow…

It can only be poison hemlock!

There used to be an infestation of it out in the pasture, but it has gotten pretty well under control in the last two years. But here in my garden? And so much of it all at once? It was as if someone had taken a head of hemlock seeds and deliberately sowed them in the row amongst my herbs and veggies.

Obviously as anyone’s would, my mind leaped to Matthew 13:24-30. “An ENEMY has done this!”

It’s strange that until this very moment, I have never read that statement from the parable with such rage.

But who? and How?

German chamomile left, hemlock right. Superficial resemblances notwithstanding, they are pretty easily differentiated.

Immediately I grabbed a bucket and dropped to my knees, and started weeding. While weeding I turned my mind to the problem of source.

Thank-God for headlamps. These days I’m not likely to be able to get after this during daylight at all.

Remember back a few weeks ago, I was building garden beds by moving dirt from the chicken yard to the garden? That was early August, 5-6 weeks ago.

Surely there is no hemlock in the chicken yard?

No, there are no hemlock plants in the chicken yard. However…

There are hemlock plants in the neighbor’s jungle, 3-10 feet to the south of the chicken yard.

He is almost 80 years old and doesn’t have the strength to keep up with his property anymore. So one area in this property especially is overgrown with blackberries, ivy and hemlock. It is exactly on the opposite side of the fence. And the prevailing winds are from the south. So when the hemlock flowered and dropped its clouds of seed, evidently enough of them were blown a few feet northward across the fence to contaminate the chicken yard. We cut them back earlier this year, but evidently not far enough.

It will take a few hours of work to get the row cleaned up, and if we can’t get it cleaned up to our satisfaction we will have to pull the whole thing out and occultate it to kill all the hemlock seeds before we plant anything else in it.

There are some lessons to be learned here. It reminded me of some conversations at Men’s group this week, about trying to keep some unhealthy influences out of our family life. I think it is good and worthwhile to try, but recognizing we live in a fallen world, some weed seeds will always fly in over the fence. The important thing is tor recognize them, and root them out before they go to seed in our own home.

This was the subject of my Bible study with Ellie in the morning before work. She asked how we root and I described how we might, for instance, if tempted to say something unkind, we could keep that remark to ourselves, think before we speak, etc.

Once we yell, or say something sarcastic or hurtful, that is like a weed going to seed in our own garden. It is sowing the seeds of more temptations to unkindness and sarcasm, both in our own gardens (souls) and in the gardens (souls) of our neighbors, that is, our family.

Of course, someone might object that in the parable Jesus says not to root out the weeds lest we also pull out some of the wheat. While that is a good caution (some of the chard came out while pulling hemlock this morning) it is not, I think, meant as an absolute. In the Ignatius Study Bible there is a note that the weed in question most likely referred to darnel, a slightly poisonous weed that looks a great deal like wheat. It is only when it is fully mature that you can tell the difference (another variation on “by their fruits you will know them.”) This is very different from hemlock, which is easily identifiable, and much easier to pull out, when it is small.

But isn’t that early sunrise pretty, though?