High on Weeds

Newsletter 2025-07-20

I have a surefire test to tell if something in my yard is a weed. Is it growing? Then it’s a weed. The system is never wrong.

I’ve enlisted the help of my children to keep the unwanted plants under control. I have a line of bushes along the alley on one side of our house. I planted them many years ago to give our yard some privacy from pedestrians walking from apartments in one direction and businesses in the other. I’d rather not have them think less of us by giving them accurate information about our lives. Nothing should be growing underneath those bushes. Naturally, it’s one of the most fertile spots on my property for unwanted greenery. It’s basically the Garden of Eden for trash plants. To eliminate them, I turned to the most destructive force on the planet: my own kids.

I created a system for the girls where, every time they walk down the alley, they’re supposed to pull up at least one plant. I thought they’d be excited for a rule that required them to destroy. They were big fans of my kick-the-mushroom policy. Occasionally, various unknown fungi pop up in our front yard after it rains. I encouraged my daughters to obliterate them with their feet. They loved it. If you’ve never kicked an unsuspecting mushroom as hard as you can, you haven’t lived. I’m sure a scientist will pop up in the comments and tell us we were just spreading fungus spores. You’re right, but that’s more mushrooms to kick. My perfect system came to an end for two reasons. First, Lola didn’t want the kids getting mushroom guts all over their shoes. We didn’t know if they were poisonous. I guess it was better to leave potentially poisonous mushrooms in place in case anyone got hungry later. The second reason is that nature realized we were having fun. Our mushroom supply dried up after that. The weeds are still here, though, since nobody liked them. Not even killing them was fun. The girls never complied with my plan for them to pull up one alley weed with every pass. Instead, they stopped walking down the alley. I admire their malicious compliance. They got in so many extra steps going the long way around the block. At least I accidentally made them healthier by helping their cardio.

I eventually got one kid to help thanks to BSA Scouts. To get her next rank, my thirteen-year-old, Mae, had to set a goal for an item she wanted to buy. After researching prices, she was supposed to come up with a plan to earn that money. Once she had the funds in hand, she needed to decide if she’d rather keep the money or have the item. The goal seemed to be to turn children into misers early. It’s never too soon to start hoarding material wealth. Remember, kids, you can take it with you, but only if you set up a wire transfer directly to heaven. Mae decided that she wanted some new headphones. She had a pair of hand-me-downs from Lola, which Mae promptly lost. She might be great at starting fires and surviving in the wilderness, but she’s terrible at keeping track of electronics. If only her phone and other devices were constantly glued to her person. Fingers crossed that she’ll soon grow an unhealthy phone addiction like her fellow teens.

After searching a few websites, Mae found a pair of headphones that were normally $150 but that were on sale for twenty dollars as part of Prime Day. All that was left was to come up with a way to make money. The most obvious way was to run her own cryptocurrency scam. I refused to let her tie up the computer for that long. Instead, I told her that she could weed under the bushes for ten dollars an hour. I wasn’t sure if that was a fair rate for a child. My kids do many chores inside of the house, none of which they’re paid for. They also don’t do a good enough job to deserve money. They work slowly and loudly, spending more time fighting with each other than doing the actual tasks at hand. They never do any duty more than half way, but that’s still half that Lola and I don’t have to do for them. It’s worth it for us to assign them jobs as long as we aren’t home to hear the screaming.

Despite the poor results, I pay the kids an allowance. I give them one dollar a week per year of age, rounded up to however old they’ll turn during that year. For example, Waffle will turn ten in November, so I have an automatic bank transfer set up to give her ten dollars a week from my bank account. That seems like a huge amount of money. I think I got a dollar a week back in the day for chores I also didn’t do. I offset my children’s high allowances by stiffing them on tooth fairy money. I’ve heard that in some households, the tooth fairy gives twenty dollars per chomper. In my house, she still gives fifty cents, which is how much I got when I lost my teeth back in 3000 BC. We believe in mythical beings but not inflation. Regardless of whether or not my kids get too much of an allowance or not enough, it fails to serve as an incentive of any kind. We don’t make much of an effort to tie it to the chores they’re supposed to be doing. They also don’t remember that they’re getting an allowance. It’s just a number on a banking website they can’t see or access. Money is only real when it’s cash in their hand that they can spend on a shopping spree in the candy aisle. Dollars might not be on the gold standard any more, but, in this house, currency is still backed by sugar.

As with nearly everything else I worry about, my deliberations about Mae’s pay rate for pulling weeds were largely pointless. Mae agreed to it because she didn’t have any other options. Even in Indiana, which is aggressively rolling back child labor laws, you can’t get a job at thirteen. You have to be at least fourteen before you can quit school to work in the mines. Mae spent two full hours pulling weeds from under the bushes. She amassed an impressive pile of plants she had slain. Then I looked under the bushes. She had barely made a dent. If anything, it looked like there were more weeds than when she started. Mae didn’t care about that. She got her headphones, which I had already purchased, violating the spirit of the BSA exercise. Rather than giving her the money and letting her decide if she wanted to keep the cash or buy the item, I bought the item in advance while it was still on sale. The real lesson she learned was to always give in to false urgency.

My eleven-year-old, Lucy, also pulls weeds sometimes. She’s my gardening buddy. I got her two raised planters, which she set up on the parking slab behind the house. She planted flower seeds in one and vegetables in the other. One planter is now absolutely overwhelmed by onions, which none of us eat. The pigs won’t touch them, either. Maybe we can give the squirrels bad breath. Meanwhile, the flowers are doing all right. She planted a dozen different packets of seeds. There’s something growing in there, but it’s hard to say what any of it is. If it’s weeds, it’s protected by our ignorance. They get the same benefit of the doubt as the flower beds in front of our house. Lucy has inadvertently become the trash plants’ greatest ally.

Early in the season, she planted additional seeds in the flower beds out front. We don’t remember exactly where. Anytime something new sprouts, I have to leave it there on the off chance that it’s one of her flowers. It never is. When I built the beds, I laid down landscaping fabric and mulch around the big plants that are supposed to be there. My preventative measures partially worked. There are fewer weeds out front than on other parts of the property. Yet, somehow, a certain number of weeds make it through. When they do, I’m required by parenting law to give them a grace period to see if, just this one time, it might be a flower. Inevitably, it’s one of the same six weeds that swarms every other part of the property. I’m sure some people in the comment section will try to convince me that natural plant life is beautiful. When they say that, they’ll be picturing wildflowers in a ditch or lush, powerful grasses on an untamed swath of prairie. That’s not what I get here. My property is host to weird, viney, and often tentacled plants that never have a flower of any kind. That last part is perplexing. Flowers are supposed to attract bees and spread pollen, which I was taught is the most effective method of plant reproduction. Apparently not. These weeds can grow anywhere, from a tiny hole in the lawn fabric under a layer of mulch to the smallest crack on the back parking slab where there’s no soil at all. Some of the weeds I pulled from back there had roots reaching to the center of the earth. Meanwhile, Lucy’s flowers generally can’t be bothered to bloom unless we absolutely baby them. She’ll eventually have some flowers in her raised flower bed, but everything outside of those secure confines has been overtaken by the naturally monstrous plants that inhabit this land. It’s a wonder that farmers in Indiana are able to grow corn instead of just large bales of weeds. The industrial scale application of weed killer might help. I should get a poison guy. That’s definitely what I’ll call him on my contact list.

Photo by Ries Bosch on Unsplash

There are some areas where I can’t use the children to assist with weeding. It’s always disappointing when I have to forgo indentured labor and do something myself. To complete my bush wall and hide the shame of pig ownership, there were some areas where I had to grow bushes inside my wooden picket fence rather than outside of it. Naturally, the pigs ate any bushes inside the yard when they were still saplings. I had to build a series of progressively tougher interior fences to defend the fledgling plants. Those fences have no gates. If I want to get over them to weed things, I have to use my overly-long, cartoonish legs, which the kids lack. That’s my fault for not giving them taller genes. I spent an inordinate amount of time weeding around those inside-the-fence line bushes this weekend. I don’t know why it mattered. I’m literally the only person in this suburb who will ever see those weeds. They were hidden from outside view by the wooden fence. But spy satellites overhead could still see them, and that was enough motivation for me to get out there. I don’t want America’s enemies laughing at my poor yard maintenance.

It took me multiple hours over two days to tear out all the stuff that wasn’t supposed to be there, which was pretty much everything. As I shredded nature, the pigs became very interested. Instead of tossing the weeds directly in a trash can, I threw them on the ground where the pigs could get them. The pigs dove in like I was feeding them a delicacy. Later, I looked at what they left behind and realized they just snouted it around before leaving it all. It was the same experience I get cooking meals from my daughters every night. I then had the privilege of picking up those weeds for a second time to throw them away. I wish the pigs did better at controlling nuisance plants, but they have standards. It’s a shame. If they liked weeds, I’d never have to buy pig food again.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James