Pulling Weeds

This time of year usually means pulling homemade salsa from the basement shelf and savoring summer’s flavors in winter. But not this season. We had no fresh garden green beans in August, no late summer patio lunches with fresh watermelon and no canned salsa in January.

Our lack of farm fresh produce didn’t come from lack of planting a garden in 2025. No, we definitely spent two warm spring days doing such. Rather, our lack of produce, and salsa, came from extra effort put in by the youngest in the family.

Garden work during easier times

It was early July and I was flat overwhelmed. We’d just come off of a scorching hot week at the Wayne County Fair, immediately followed by a scorching hot week in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the National Junior Angus show. There was a laundry room full of dirty clothes that needed sorted, a stock trailer that needed unloaded, an empty refrigerator that needed restocked and a garden that had turned into Lawn & Disorder. It was a neglected mess.

And how could I forget the darling children? They were exhausted from two weeks of big activity, many miles, late nights and very early mornings. They’d been living off food prepared in a mobile trailer or a gas station. They’d consumed more sugar in two weeks than typically ingested over Christmas break. And they’d been down each other’s throats for the last four days - one breathed too loudly and one chewed too loudly.

It was one afternoon when I finally lost it.

I sent the children outside to the garden to pull weeds in punishment for their constant nagging at one another. They needed (more) farm fresh air and to do something constructive with their hands that didn’t involve trying to strangle the other sibling.

There’s a sound our daughter makes when something’s terribly wrong and it involves her brother. I first heard that high-pitched shriek when she was three and he’d just learned to walk. He’d found a tub of Vaseline and coated the living room. I remember the sound, the pitch, and rounding the corner to find the mess.

Fast forward six years later, and my peace and quiet inside the laundry room was abruptly interrupted by the same scream. I dropped the soiled jeans and ran to the screen door.

There, I could see and hear Cyrus bawling, running to hide under the trampoline with two fists full of weeds.

“Caroline! Why are you screaming at him?!” I called across the yard.

“Cause CYRUS just pulled all of our plants out of the garden!”

I whipped my head around to under the trampoline where he was sitting Indian style, fists still full of plants, still crying incessantly.

“I was trying to do it fast and all the weeds were in a row so I just went down the row and pulled them as fast as I could!” he explained through the tears.

I walked out to the garden.

Green beans: gone.

Watermelon: gone.

Half of our tomato plants: gone.

Like any super stressed woman, I did the next logical thing and called my mother. I was fired up and she had to hear what her grandson had done now! She responded, “Lindsay. Have you ever taught him what a weed looks like versus a vegetable plant? Or did you just send him out there to figure that out on his own?”

How dare she? I considered hanging up on her.

The kids and I spent the next hour trying to replant what had been pulled, but major heat stress the following week was the final demise of that half of the garden.

While in search of the perfect salsa that emulates homemade, I’ve brought home eight different brands from four local stores and none seem to match that small batch, kitchen-a-mess flavor.

Lesson learned: when life gives you weeds, don’t expect salsa.