Listen to your mother,
people. If your mom grows beautiful, bounteous harvests year after year in her vegetable garden, she knows a thing or two. Sure, she sometimes uses Round-Up, and she digs up all these pretty flowers, and she's more apt to chop a snake in half with her hoe than to do the "Oh, Hello, my friend" that I do with snakes.
Call me cranky, but I'm tired, and my hands are blistered with poison ivy (it hides in the flower beds! A stealth bomber, it is! A sneaky, furtive stalker!) and I don't feel like writing a thorough treatise, thoughtful and well-organized. I'm about to write a book of mistakes I've made and call it Agony in the Garden. For 21 years I've lived on this acreage. The things I shouldn't have planted, and the things I shouldn't have eradicated, may take an entire decade to manifest, but once they do, oh, boy, are they manifest, and multitudinous, like those legions of devils Jesus would cast out of pigs. Come Lord Jesus, come cast out the malevolents in my garden, please? (Eve was framed, you know!) Pretty please....?
Eh. More dirt under my nails (nope, not gonna wear gloves, or sunscreen). My penance. For all my grievous sins, I stand in the dirt, in the hot sun, or the humid drizzle replete with gnats, and I cull the proverbial wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats, the Alien Invader from the Chosen Ones, the natives.
Note: I did try the natural alternative to Round-Up. You know the one:
--a gallon of vinegar
--2 cups of epsom salts
--1/4 cup Dawn dish soap
And I tell ya what: IT DOES NOT WORK. Not on my tenacious Ninja weeds, the conquering hordes. On other people's weeds, it seems to perform as well as the Round-Up (which I do not use). Mechanical methods, laborious and time consuming as they are--pulling, piling, burning the invaders--will be my natural, go-to remedy for as long as I'm able.
If only I'd listened to my mother!
Moms know things.
Back up to those flowers. Yeah, the sweet-smelling purple "phlox" -- ok, she got the name wrong. It's Dame's Rocket, and it's no well-mannered dame; it's a rude, aggressive invader.
So, she dug it up, and I rescued it, drove it home to my little prairie restoration 90 miles away, and allowed it to grow where it will. Turns out, it will grow ANYWHERE. Oh, sure, it's pretty. On the bright side, it's pretty easy to pull up and toss into the burn heap.
Note: the flowers in the foreground are my woodland native, wild geranium, which appeared here as a volunteer. The taller, brighter, bolder blossom is the intrusive Dame's Rocket.
Dame's rocket (Hesperis matronalis) is a Eurasian biennial belonging to the mustard family. It was introduced to North America in the 1600's and has naturalized itself in moist, wooded areas, but can also invade open areas. It may be sold in garden centers as a perennial and is often included in "wildflower" seed mixes.
Hesperis matronalis is an herbaceous plant species in the family Brassicaceae. It has numerous common names, including dame's rocket, damask-violet, dame's-violet, dames-wort, dame's gilliflower, night-scented gilliflower, queen's gilliflower, rogue's gilliflower, summer lilac, sweet rocket, mother-of-the-evening, and winter gilliflower.
I wish the Dame's Rocket were my only faux pas,
but there are so many more, more than I can fit into a book, much less into one post.
Consider the lily,
Jesus said. I did. I held Lily of the Valley in the highest regard. So beautiful and smells so heavenly, who wouldn't welcome her dainty white bells on slender stalks?
I'm so frustrated at their rate of expansion and tenacity, I don't even want to post a picture of the rhizomes and root system. I've dug, dug, dug, with a spade, for hours, day after day, digging up lily of the valley, and another lily, "Tiger lily," which has its health benefits, yes, and you can have them all. Twenty wheelbarrows full every year since 2017, the magic ten-year mark in which all those lovely flowers I rescued from my mother's chopping and digging gained their foothold on my own poorly guarded turf.
Competition!
So many plants compete to occupy the same square inch of space. It's like one little square foot of my flowerbed is Manhattan and 20 nationalities of immigrants are fighting for their share of the turf. You cannot all fit here. Sorry.
Vinca Minor (periwinkle) is sold to this day at garden nurseries. I want to walk through with a blow torch and blast these plants to garden-hell. Want periwinkle? Come on to my house. I have pulled mountains of it this year. Oh, such pretty blossoms. Oh, so many uses for the herbalist. Come and get it!! I'm still pulling, pulling, and pulling this stuff. "Shade loving." I planted some in the north timber, thinking to slow the more unpleasant natives: poison ivy, buckthorn, half a dozen varieties of sticking, clinging, scratching, deadly vines, like greenbriar (it kills deer! Not gonna subject you to a photo, but a doe who gets trapped in this vine may starve to death.) Hog peanut, bedstraw, I cannot even name all the icky vines offhand, and don't even get me started on motherwort. Wouldn't you expect better with a name like that? Ha. It's so painful to walk past and soooo difficult to remove from clothing. I didn't even mention the worst of the stick-tights, and I'm not going to today. Nope. Not today.
Note: Yes, the vinca took over, and no, it did not choke out the poison ivy or the sticky-icky-awful vines.
NO such luck.
Backing up to the MUSTARD family....Dame's Rocket and its most evil cousin....
Every day is a day for lamenting the one thing I can say I did not plant
I am INNOCENT ....
..... These seeds travel on the fur of large animals, such as horses and deer, and also in flowing water and by human activity. It is because of this, garlic mustard spreads in woodlands and quickly takes over native woodland wildflowers.
Some will defend garlic mustard
as something less than 100% evil, but I give it no quarter. Pull. Pull. Burn. Burn. I used to pull it on properties I didn't own, like the Department of Natural Resources land, and I could not possibly sustain it. You see what happens. Even in a flood plain that's been turned into a monoculture of non-native grass, here come the tens of thousands of garlic mustard seedlings:
Just how evil is garlic mustard? Pull it up before it's even in flower, in March. Toss into the firepit. Come back in late April, and lo and behold, look what this lone plant hath wrought:
I try to keep up with it, burn it fast, but most of the time, I end up with seven heaping wheelbarrows full. Mountains, literally, MOUNTAINS of garlic mustard to burn, burn, burn. This is the deceptively serene view of the conflagration of early April:
I use the term loosely, and I do watch over my fires, but I have been known, more than once over the years, to cause a 20-foot pine tree to go up in flame, and... well, "Agony in the Garden" has many chapters. Today, it's about my mom and her #NoMercy policy toward pretty, sweet-smelling, but evil garden invaders.
A conflagration isn't just a few flames; it's an especially large and destructive fire that causes devastation. That tiny campfire that somehow turned into a raging forest inferno? You could call that intense, uncontrolled blaze a conflagration.
Fiddlehead ferns are native,
going back to the age of the dinosaurs. I have no regrets, planting them by the front door, but they will require due diligence to keep them from Conquering the Universe. In the foreground, the lamium you see is what remains after a through pulling and thinning, believe it or not. Look how it army-crawls up the step to my door.
My driveway is longer than a football field with prairie flowers lining it on both sides, and never believe that native prairies get established after a few years and self-maintain. Not when the soil was pasture for so many decades, with seeds that lie dormant for years, springing to life every time some idiot disturbs the dirt. I have created so much work for myself. I have sentenced myself to a chain-gang of weeding out tall non-native grasses and even pretty flowers that just want to choke out all other life forms, cancel diversity, and become a monoculture.
I could name all these plants and tell which lie on the battlefield, dying, or pretending to die but secretly plotting a comeback when I turn my back. I'm too weary to name them for you. If I take time to do that, I might as well write a little chapter book. "Agony in the Garden," by the decade, and if you're Catholic, you'll get the intentions therein. Yes, rather than spend mindless hours weeding with songs like "Bill Bailey's Goat" playing in my head, or repeats of last night's movie replaying in my mind, I try to meditate, focus, dwell on the positive, beam my intentions or prayers to the universe or to whatever God may be listening. I married into Catholicism, after abandoning my Fundamentalist uprbringing. I've internalized a lot of lovely prayers and meditations, met a community of marvelous saints, and invited them to keep me company during my torments in the garden (which of course are absolutely nothing compared to the Agony of Jesus sweating blood and tears in the Garden the night of nights). I'm still a heretic, an unbeliever, a skeptic, but at the same time, I've kept all doors and windows open for any friendly spirits to wander in and say hello as I grub around in the dirt, seeking to restore balance and order, beauty and harmony, and food for the pollinators who in turn feed us, all in the name of the "healing" and "mindful" and restorative work of tending a garden.
The snake grass, aka horsetail, hath tempted me,
and I fear it may become my biggest gardening mistake yet. A pity: I do love this native. This title is a cautionary tale in and of itself:
How to Grow (or Get Rid of) Horsetail Plant
... Horsetail Equisetum arvense or Equisetum hyemale can function as:
A modern-looking landscape accent plant.
A disastrous plant that is extremely difficult to get rid of.
Horsetail is a true survivor. Drastic measures are needed to eradicate it if it takes over your garden or field. With that in mind, we will cover the scouring rush from both perspectives.
I love this primitive grass that goes back farther than the dinosaurs. I dug it up from -- wait for it -- my mom's ditch!!! Somehow, in my half-century of life, I've never seen it overtake her garden, so I dared to move a few over to my little acreage. Give it five or ten years, usually it's ten (decades are magical), and some innocent looking species will morph into the Plague. For now, it's only just beginning to spread, but you should see the warnings other gardeners have posted. I am duly warned. #NoMercy, right?
HORSETAILS AND SNAKE GRASS: RELICS BEFORE THE DINOSAURS
Snake grass, or horsetails as they are known by many, get their roughness and strength from silica in their stems....
The Dutch find value in horsetails, mostly in maintaining the dikes that keep their land dry. The plant has deeply rooted rhizomes (horizontal underground stems) which bind the soil, a helpful aid in reinforcing walls that keep the sea out. A weed anywhere else, it is an asset in Holland.
... Horsetails—snake grass–are not esteemed by those who wish to keep their beaches well-groomed. Their roots are hard to tear out—remember the Dutch and their dikes?—causing them to reappear after great effort has been exerted to remove them. Still, we should appreciate their good qualities: they scour, they sandpaper, they can be tied. Not only that, they provide a glimpse into a different world 350 million years ago. If you see a millipede hanging out among the stems of horsetails, you might be looking out on a scene enacted 380 million years ago. Horsetails deserve our respect for their venerable age. --Richard Fidler
Dear God,
Please do not punish me oh Lord for loving this tenacious you plant you created; let my snake grass thrive without choking out everything else in its path. I am sorry for having waged war on the stinging nettle and the broadleaf plantain. Forgive me my trespasses. Grant me wisdom and discernment. Help me make peace with all the flora, not just the fauna. P.S. "Fauna" does not include stinging, itch-inducing insects. Amen.
Casualties!
My war, my Agony in the Garden, wages all summer long.
It's enough to make me look forward to a long, cold winter, and some of those stinging nettles and horsetail grass natives brewing in a nice, hot tea.
P.S. Please have mercy on the snakes, people. They're a gardener's friend.
Spiders, too.
Chiggers, ticks, mosquitoes, gnats: hell can take them!
And now I will stop raving and revisit these tags: #herbalism #gardening #healing #mentalhealthawareness #minfulness and #naturalmedicine, reminding me, on the heels of my latest gardening disasters, that all is well, and all shall be well. It's a work in progress, and I am a slow learner.
Another day, I will be posting glorious photos of the prairie flowers that made it, and I will rejoice in the sunshine and harmony of nature and all that.
I might even have some peas, thyme, rosemary, and tomatoes lurking after the Dame's Rocket is done blooming and I make room for some herbal medicine outside my back door.
If someone else writes a book of herbal lessons and titles it Agony in the Garden, please report to me ASAP. I didn't even mention the Lumious Mysteries today, though I did hint at the crowning with thorns. And you all know springtime spells R-E-S-U-R-R-E-C-T-I-O-N. One of my favorite decades.
Joyful
Sorrowful
Luminous
Glorious
I'd have used them as hashtags, but only Catholics would get it. You see how many chapters and themes, plants and life events, prayers and hopes, might be woven in with the decades (figuratively and literally):
source: The Rosary Ministry of St. Michael the Archangel
And yes, skeptic that I am, I reflect on these mysteries every day, in the garden, or on nature walks. Why? Well, I'll write the book, and try to explain. Someday!
If I have offended the community with my vehement garden lament, please know that summer isn't the whole story. Great things have happened in the understory (after I chopped out the buckthorn and pulled the ivy).....
Hey, the exodus from Eden hasn't been easy.
Good work your garden is wonderful !LUV
Ha ha ha, you didn't look too closely at the casualties piling up, eh?
THank you!
Alas, the techn-glitches thwart me yet again. How to import this, upload that, share this other...
somehow I never seem to get these things right.
Hi @carolkean, you were just shared some LUV thanks to @felixgarciap. Holding at least 10 LUV in your wallet enables you to give up to 3 LUV per day, for free. See the LUV in your wallet at https://hive-engine.com or learn about LUV at https://peakd.com/@luvshares https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUptF5k64xBvsQ9B6MjZo1dc2JwvXTWjWJAnyMCtWZxqM
Cool - thank you!
Gotta follow up on this now and Share the Luv! Here's hoping I don't need to access peakd to do it....
Hey stay out of the garden and go to the supermarket.. No Chiggers, ticks, mosquitoes, gnats: 😁
You sound like my husband!!
I gave up the vegetable garden thing. Just a few stalks of asparagus and rhubarb here.
Some stinging nettle sauteed in a skillet, this year, my first time trying it - and it's better than spinach!
Mint in a salad is all right, too.
But rows of seeds in neat little beds? My neighbor lost all her green beans to furry mammals, already, and she's hoping the leaves grow back. Her husband is building more cages to keep out the hungry rabbits, possums, woodchucks, deer... this is what happens when dogs are kept indoors all night. (For their safety, not for ours.)
Thanks for reading and commenting. :)
Stinging nettle is horrible stuff .. I don't care how good it is to eat, I won't go near it.. Yeah gardening is a tough racket.. lot of work and expectation.. then heartbreak..
All hail, the supermarket, the trucks, the interstate highways!
While I feel your pain, this is hilarious!!! hahaha
I recently learned that garlic mustard has a long tap root. When I pull it up it feels like I've easily gotten it all, but in fact I've left that root where it will send up greenery ten or twenty fold. That shot of the tiny garlic mustard seedlings is horrifying!!!
But I also know that, with all this work you put in, you have some gorgeous garden spots. You are an excellent garden mommy.
Aw, thanks. Upon further reflection, I worried that I had offended this community, having failed to convey how much of the Light and Dark, Joyful and Sorrowful, Effort and Reward are at play here. At play being a key word. I tend to sound strident and awful when I'm really having fun with words more than anything. Just gotta get that across better. Thanks so much for your support @owasco! Not many people "get" me, but you do. :)
@owasco, it occurs to me that part of your apparent ease dealing with conquering alien hordes is that you're working in a smaller space than my own seven acres of wetland, woodland, clay, savanna (dry prairie) and other crazy-different ecosystems on one little acreage. I try not to laugh at those who complain about shoveling their driveways in town--mine is longer than a football field and I've hand-shoveled the heavy, wet snow many times.
Smaller scale gardening... that would simplify my life. My own sister scoffed at me for pulling weeds in my "Little Forest" - called it a waste of time! - but she hadn't seen the purple haze of wild geranium blanketing the understory. Didn't see my bluebell colonies. Didn't consider that restoring a little piece of my world is a mission to me, my most valuable contribution aside from being a blood donor, but that is another chapter...
This is very much how my yard looks, except that so many of my natives perished (my pairie smoke! rattlesnake master! Leadplant! and voles at all but one of the 80 liatris bulbs I planted along the long driveway!): Micro prairies: No yard is too small to go with earth-friendly native plants via @journalsentinel
That's my dream yard! Alas, I do not conquer anything. I let it be for the most part. Garlic mustard has killed more desirable plants than I can remember (comfrey, lilies, valerian and eupatorium among them), and now the lamium is coming along and killing the garlic mustard. It's a good thing I think lamium is pretty. Vinca keeps poison ivy down.
I have never been able to grow two things here - echinacea and lavender. The echinacea, supposedly deer resistant, is one of the first plants deer reduce to stubble. Lavender just will not grow here, no matter where I plant it.
AS a Botanist and Plant Ecologist, this really made my day. Your writing skill is damn amazing - entertaining and still scientifically accurate. What you are experiencing is what happens when there is a disruption to the natural balance of the ecosystem. The most exotic plant usually end up being invasive, they outcompete all the native species and establish a kingdom of their own. The current dynamics in climate is also not helping, even some native species have started exhibiting invasive properties. I think you are working too much to tackle it, all you need is a balance, even though I have got no idea how that can be achieved. Perhaps you should try planting more of native, non-invasive plants in place of the exotic ones.
Thank you!!! In fact I have planted sooo many natives, easily a hundred species, and many have flourished. The native white aster and the several types of goldenrod are trying to take over, but they're much easier to pull than the lilies and periwinkle. Same with the explosion of Maxamillion sunflowers (which I love) - they're mercifully easy to pull.
The soapwort will get its own chapter.
Bergamot is taking over, while I work soo hard to get Culver's Root and ascelpius tuberosa to spread.
It took more than 15 years for my tiny bluebells to start colonizing. Now the dame's rocket and the periwinkle and the lamium are trying to crowd them out.
I wasn't kidding: there's a 500 page book here, if anyone ever wanted to read it. What would set mine apart from the others is the way I pray all day as I work, even though I don't even "know" the God of the Rosary exists. I'm pretty sure the Biblical God (Trinity) was poached from the Greeks and from Zoroaster, and the story of Job was pillaged from ancient Egypt, and the more I talk, the more I cast doubt, so I'll stop here and just say I really do call upon the Catholic "community of saints" to keep me company as I work alone, and I invite any other kind spirits, any denomination, any god/goddess/God, to spread seeds of love and life.
You are totally correct about not planting exotic species, but my mom was discarding them, and I couldn't bear to see those pretty, sweetly scented flowers shriveling in the sun.
No good deed goes unpunished,
right?
Chapter 5....
thanks again @gentleshaid for your kind comments!
You are welcome. Giving you a follow right away.
Cool - I already started following you. I'm in awe of your science degrees. I would flunk botany. I look at this tree identification book, and it's like Find Waldo, but worse: I cannot even see the differences in six varieties of elm leaves. Our daughter had a college class in ornithology, and this textbook had a page of 36 'identical' (to me) sparrows. Every year I search online for the ID of some plant or other but the next year I start all over, unable to REMEMBER names.... I do have soapwort firmly ID'd now, but the tree seedlings and gazillions of anemones still trip me up.
One reason my introduction of lamium and periwinkle is so disastrous is that they multiplied like a virus, while my tender little trout lily, bloodroot flower, and other woodland ephemerals have still not "colonized" in five years. And I have found tiger lily and lamium choking out my treasured bluebells, some of which I had rescued from a woodland that got chopped down for a sod farm, and bluebell seedlings emerged in the new grass, so of course I snagged a few, and managed to get some established in my understory. Almost 20 years for them to start spreading!!!
Thanks for the follow. :)
Congratulations @carolkean! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Your next target is to reach 65000 upvotes.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPSupport the HiveBuzz project. Vote for our proposal!
I am guilty of buying vinca from the nursery. I am also guilty of setting a 20' pine tree on fire trying to burn yard rubbish. I was mortified when I had to call the neighborhood fire department to come put it out. They put out ALL the little rubbish fires I had burning, too. I guess they decided that I could not be trusted with any kind of flame.
In a few months, hopefully I will be posting about our garden project in the mountains of Costa Rica. I have never seen such beautiful native flora anywhere in my life. I can't wait to start cultivating it! I'm also planning to grow vegetables and fruits by the truckload. And turmeric! I'm loving that stuff. I can surely tell a difference in how my body feels since I've been guzzling golden lattes several times a day.
Of all the things we have in common, did we really BOTH of us turn a 20-feet pine tree into a holocaust???
My first fire was in the wetlands, of all places, when I was burning a rotted, reeking raccoon carcass the dogs dragged home, burning it in a metal barrel, in the WETLAND, I tell you, and yet, and yet, a spark, and a few dried leaves, and I actually had to call the fire trucks that day. This was in spring 2021. This is the first time I've made a public confession. My husband knows, but I never told the neighbors, who worked full time, outside the home, and I believe they never knew, or they'd have surely teased me about it (or worse).
Do you know how hard it is to get a fire going, and keep it going? I burned a WETLAND.... oh, and a pond liner. Pond. Wet. You know. Not supposed to happen.
But I want to hear more about Costa Rica and turmeric--enough of the confessions! My transgressions are far too numerous to recount.
Apparently yes, we both did turn pine trees into infernos and had to involve fire departments. Not my best moment, either. The tree survived, in my case. Still lives with black bark as a testament to my oopsie.
One of the pine trees I had planted did survive a mini-conflagration.
The older tree, however, did not. The wind picked up, some pine needles on the damp ground caught a spark, the flame spread to the sap that coated the 20-foot tree, and POOF!!! It was all black and dead in sixty seconds.
As if to prove Nature reigns supreme and my casualties are trivial, a derecho came through last year and killed EVERY SINGLE WHITE PINE we had planted, plus a hundred other mature trees of various species. The mighty oaks fared worse than the tall, skinny black cherry natives. The ludicrous Siberian elms also out-survived the old oaks.
"Agony in the Garden" could have a sequel, Horror in the Forest, the aftermath of an extraordinary prairie "hurricane" that blew 140 mph winds, unabated, for 40 minutes, taking half the tree canopy for many miles around, which a mere tornado doesn't do. For years to come we will see the battered, broken branches of trees that survived, and the empty spaces left by those that did not. Recently we drove north of town and gasped in amazement as we left the derecho zone and suddenly, for mile after endless mile, we beheld UNBROKEN trees. I had forgotton what "normal" looked like.
Your tree survives - with black bark! - amazing.
So glad the turmeric is working for you!! I buy mine. :) It's not native to the Midwest.
I've made tea of stinging nettle - sadly, I was too good at chopping that out, and I don't have nearly as much of it in the woods anymore. Evil vinca minor, however, is dominating the understory. At the rate it's thriving, I'm afraid it will choke out the trees. They can take the Siberian elms - invasive non-natives planted by birds, 30 years ago, and sprouting everywhere that we don't mow, which is more than half the property. Scary stuff, these invaders. Those who say they can "live and let live" must not have as much stuff flourishing in tight quarters as we in the Midwest.
I'm broadening my horizons, welcoming back the broadleaf plantain, mullein, dandelion, and all that, and encouraging the ginger, but dang, that little native is slow to colonize. My tiny colony of mayapples is slowly expanding. (Thanks to my relentless pulling of the garlic mustard that was inhibiting it 20 years ago when we first moved here.)
See, there's a books' worth of stuff here, and no time to write it all. Still pulling that pasture grass!!
Looking forward to your herbal adventure stories from C.R.....
I've made stinging nettle tea as well! And used the cooked leaves in quite a few dishes. I also use the raw, stinging leaves to help with some of the skin lesions I get with lupus. Odd, that the chemicals which cause pain in healthy tissue actually numb the pain of inflamed tissue. You just have to work up a good bit of nerve to try it for the first time. I swear by the stuff.
You're brave - applying the sting of the nettle to inflamed tissue, and who ever guessed that what aggravates healthy tissue would alleviate the lupus-inflamed tissue! Who figured out that jewelweed and plantain lessen the itch of poison ivy?? So many primitive peoples were scientists, experimenting, observing, noticing, deducing.... thank you, ancestors!
A special thank you to @techslut - any time a post of mine earns ten dollars or more, it's almost guaranteed to be the result of your "whale slap" of a vote. Thank you!! And @curie, and all others who've upvoted, thank you!!
I planted many of these, knowing they were invasive. I used edging and each year I have to hack them back in bounds.
I am also covered in poison ivy, but not from my gardens. I had to repair 8.5 acres of fencing and that's where the poison ivy is. No avoiding it. I'd NEVER use roundup, and I know that there's not much will kill the "super" poison ivy that has invaded New England in the last decade.
Weeding is decidedly a chore....
Never use Roundup... keep chopping, digging, pulling... I'm glad you didn't add, "And stop complaining about having to do it." I'm a complainer. You're a trooper! Do you have jewelweed or broadleaf plantain at hand to help with the itch of the ivy rash?
I am long past the stage where those will help. I am pretty badly allergic to it, and if I get enough of a rash, it goes systemic with non - PI rashes on my soft skin areas. I keep it covered with adhesive to prevent irritation and if the PI rash reaches a certain amount, I have to use prednisone.
You're right, the jewelweed and plantain help only if you catch the ivy outbreak in its earliest stages.
I do believe it helps alleviate the frantic, relentless itching.
May you steer clear of it - and may I - though the dreaded ivy seems to find us, always!