Langreck: In the weeds

Growing up, as I have admitted in the past, there were several chores I didn’t like doing, including picking strawberries from our family patch of close to 1,000 plants, pulling weeds and working with my 4-H livestock three times a day.

Now that I’m older and have some experience under my belt, I know those tasks I didn’t like were important and needed to be done, whether I liked them or not.

While I still don’t love pulling weeds, I actually somewhat enjoy it and find it relaxing to pull weeds when I’m super stressed — not to mention being able to enjoy the fruits of my labor all summer and spring when plants begin to bloom.

Another thing I’ve realized is while I hated picking weeds as a kid, my dad was usually weeding right beside my siblings and me. He would usually find a way to slip something educational that we didn’t know about the weed into any conversations we had and how to identify certain types of weeds, especially ones that looked similar to plants that were not weeds.

I recently had the opportunity to pull weeds with my son. For the record, he wasn’t doing it willingly — he was caught lying, which I did not put up with, so one of his punishments was helping to pull weeds on spring break.

I decided I would weed with him because we have a lot of flowerbeds that needed weeding. I wish I could say he was the best weed puller I had ever seen, but he wasn’t.

However, after an hour, I think he learned his lesson when he said he would rather babysit or go to school than pull weeds and promised he wouldn’t lie to me again.

So, I guess you could say the value of hard work by pulling weeds is still alive, and I plan to pass this experience on to the rest of my kids and see what they take away from pulling weeds.