The "Tombstone"

I spent the morning working on a bed in front of the house.  Ed took the garden tractor and was working elsewhere.  It's my job to weed along bed  edges and to try to locate the desired plants among the weeds. This is a New England aster.  Right in the crown of the plant is a huge chickweed, some black eyed Susans and countless other weeds.  This plant needs to be dug out.  Ed and his pry bar are the perfect tools for this job, but they were not right at hand.

Here at the Stone wall Garden we use stones a lot.  I regularly use them as plant markers.  So a new stone marker, aka "The Tombstone", was born.  Now Ed knows when he sees a stone like this in the crown of  a plant that the handwriting is on the stone and it means rip that sucker out.  It needs to go!  With lots of other New England asters available, the time necessary to rid this plant of all of the intruders is better spent on something else.

When the plant is resting in peace in the compost, Ed will replace "The Tombstone" in my garden cart.  There it will be waiting ready for me to mark another candidate for removal and placement in it's final resting place, the compost.