Today’s Lesson
Hackberries are the plague of my gardens. We live close to the wilds, there are lots of hackberries there, and lots of birds to eat their fruit. The birds visit our trees. Poop the digested seeds. Hackberries sprout. Pulling them up while young is fairly easy, but the young state doesn’t last long. Miss it and the tree has dug a tap root into the earth that resists hand-pulling and digging.
Last year I bought a mechanical device to aide me in my efforts, a tree and shrub puller. A testament to Archimedes, it has a long handle with a clamp on the end. I used one while volunteering in the park next door as we removed Ligustrum’s. It was a beauty. My first effort’s, however, were in vain. The grabber grabbed, but the tap root held and the top of the hackberry snapped off. I was disgusted. But I preserved, however, and this season discovered, if I loosened the soil a bit and dug down to below the root collar, I achieved much better results. The hackberries are disappearing. Yeah, me.
The lesson is one I’ve learned over and over and over, from my days as a home auto technician through various episodes of appliance repair, which doesn’t speak well of my ability to learn, but is still valuable. Have patience. Take your time. Try different approaches. Understand that nothing is always easy, anger is the enemy, and the laws of physics are immutable. And one more thing, it’s way easier to pull a hackberry out of soft dirt. So, wait for rain.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale