Have you been watching the cleevers (or cleavers) any way, galium aparine. They have been with us for months, first showing their heads not long after Christmas. They have now reached the stage when you can easily sweep up in your, arms a bunch weighing a few pounds, without effort.
Or you can gently pull from one of your small plantings of birch or whatever, a sort of trellis they have made through the branches. They are surely the most proliferous of all weeds, with the great virtue that they can fairly easily be removed when in full lush growth.
It would be simple to deal with them early on in the year, when they are three or four inches high a blast of this or that from the prayer, and that's the end.
But the wielder of the spray is more and more asking himself even when protected by all the gear if the substance he deploys is going to destroy him in the long run, never mind the cleevers. How many people have stories of the effects of sheep dips of the past? It all may be a scare story, as the mad cow disease may be overdone, but the sprayer is cautious.
You may know cleevers under some other name goose grass, catchweed, bed straw.
And the catchweed name surely derives from the fact that it sticks to your hand, to your clothes, through, apparently, a system of tiny hooks, or hairs. It produces hairy little balls which children throw about. Old Culpeper writes "It groweth by the hedge and ditch sides, in many places of this land, and is so troublesome and inhabitant in gardens, that it rampeth upon and is ready to choke whatever grows near it."
Butt Culpeper being a herb doctor then goes on to recommend concoctions that you are not likely to follow. The juice and the seed together taken in wine, helpeth those bitten with an adder, by preserving the heart from the venom." In broth it helps slimming. The distilled water helps with jaundice. Pounded, the leaves help stop a bleeding wound. And then the spring "cleansing of the blood."
We shouldn't laugh. Some essences of these, and these like them, may be in modern medicines. But don't experiment TUT-TUT department. A correspondent sent a cutting of Time's Eye, with, written in the margin "Tut'tut! Different FROM please.", where different to what had been written. And wrote the same on another Eye. Sorry.
Won't happen again. And Dr Henry Lappin, of Kells, apropos those plovers' eggs
"You mention plover, lapwing, peewit and green Plover, but not a mention of the pilibin by which name he was always known in this area." Point taken.