The scourge of the barefoot class

My nurseryman tells me this will be a bad summer for barefooted kids. A hardier than usual crop of Soliva sessilis sneaking into lawns across south Louisiana is the cause of the trouble.
I didn’t know the fancy name back in the days when my shoes came off on the last day of school and didn’t go back on – except on Sundays – until school started again. But I recognized the plant known to us as stickers and to some other folk as burrweed, spurweed, piquante, sand bur (because they like dry sandy soil), or some other names that are not suitable for print.
It ranks up there with hot pavement as the curse of the barefoot class in summer. Edwin Rollin Spencer, a man who devoted much of his life to studying weeds, writes in his tome, “All About Weeds,” that “no other grassy plant has this . . . lance-armed bur, and a description therefore is almost useless. He who finds a sand bur does not have to be told what it is.”
The plant is kin to the pretty asters that we grow for cut flowers, looks a little bit like parsley, and is innocuous enough until warm weather sets in. That’s when it wants to spread its seeds by growing sharp little thorns and attaching itself to whatever passes by, including bare feet.
And once the stickers are in the grass, they stay in the grass. My nurseryman gave me a spray that will kill the plant. That’s a good thing, but even though the plant is dead its sharp spines will still be waiting for something to latch onto.
He said the best way to control the stickers is to not let them grow in the first place – which is pretty useless advice. You don’t notice them until they stick you, and then it is too late to do much about it except kill this year’s crop so that it doesn’t germinate another crop for next summer.
One garden tipster says you might be able to get rid of the stickers by setting your mower as low as it will go and cutting them every three days. But that works only if you have a bag attachment on your mower; otherwise you just spread the seed. It also works only if you are inclined to mow every three days in the heat of the summer.
Another guy says putting sugar on the lawn will do the trick. He says sugar helps feed beneficial microbes that will make your lawn healthier, and that a healthy lawn will squeeze out bad weeds. What he doesn’t say is that sugar will also feed fire ants that bite worse than stickers stick.
The soundest advice seems to be to keep your shoes on and pray for an early frost.
The essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed there is a bit of good in all creation and that a weed “is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” That has a nice ring to it, and some naturalists and philosophers might even agree with him – until, that is, they try to run barefoot through a sticker patch.
That generally brings out a more pragmatic view of their role and virtue, not to mention a description saltier than a philosopher might use.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.