Most mothers instill in their daughters a love for cooking, or for sewing a fine seam, embroidery perhaps, reading maybe. Well my Mom was different, bless her heart, she showed me the joy of weeding !

Yes, you heard right ...weeding... you know ..... those weeds in the garden.

Mom would sit for hours on the lawn extricating those minute invasive blue weeds, with a screwdriver to make sure she got the whole root.

Or she would stand, stiff legged, bent at the waist, pulling dandelions or khaki weed, or whatever delectable little monster caught her eagle eye.

Weeding is probably the most euphoric of all tasks, you satisfying, so rewarding... try it... of course one must always get the whole root, thats the name of the game !!

Those horrid paper thorn weeds, before the thorns grow of course, have that deliciously long tap root that can be eased out of the ground so delightfully that one can even get shivers down the spine !! Those tap roots can get to be a foot long, one has the sensation that a dentist gets possibly when extracting a tooth !!

A broken root of course is a sin, cos that little nasty weed will rear its ugly head again before you can blink.

The best time to weed is right after the rain when the ground is soft and the earth smells rich and inviting. A screwdriver is your best weeding tool, (I have to to hide the fact from He Who Must Be Obeyed Instantly, that I am using his screwdrivers to weed !!)

My gardener knows to leave my weeds alone !! He knows to leave them to me and sometimes if I am too busy during the rainy season to get into the garden, I can find weeds that come up to my kneecaps standing tall and arrogant just waiting to be plucked !!

Of course weeding in Texas ain't no fun at all. They have gone and taken all the joy out of this very special occupation.

Nobody pulls weeds by hand in Texas, those thar cowboys have invented a weed puller that enables you to stand there, a can of Budweiser in one hand, in the other hand one holds a long handled tool with three pins and curly tongue at one end, a gentle push, in go the pins, a slight turn of the hand, a sip of the Bud, a small tug and out comes your weed, oh, so disappointing !!

Gardening in Texas in fact is so very different to home. With no resident Horticulturist, gardening was done by by Yours Truly !! If ones property is over the size of a pocket hanky the lawn mowers are a treat, miniature tractors which you can drive up and down the lawn with gay abandon. Very few flowers, just basic ornamental evergreen bushes and trees, and vast swathes of lawn which come right down to the road verge, of course watered by an automatic sprinkler system. But the weeds still manage to rear their ugly little heads in spite of it all !!

Cheers, this weed's for you Mom !!