My regular and faithful lawn winter weeds are making their annual growth spurt just prior to blooming, producing seeds and going away until next year. 

I get the same ones every year: chickweed, henbit, Carolina geranium and an assortment of clovers for broadleaf species and the reliable annual bluegrass as the grassy one. 

I read a bit about chickweed authored by a chickweed fan in Florida who raved about the plant’s herbal, medicinal and culinary traits as if we should be proud to have it come up in the yard.  His recipe for edible chickweed involved frying bacon and onions and placing those atop washed chickweed and adding sour cream, eggs, flour and nutmeg and baking the combo in a pie shell. The way I see it, a person could mix any non-toxic plant with bacon, onion, sour cream and nutmeg and have something fit to eat.

Common names of plants are whatever somebody somewhere calls them and such a name might or might not be the only one used for a given species. Thus chickweed is so called because it was observed somewhere that chickens really like to eat it, albeit raw. 

If you ever look closely at henbit, it is easy to see the leaves do look like they were “hen bit.” 

Carolina geranium truly is a geranium, just not a very pretty one. Quite a few plants have “Carolina” in their common names, but this particular wild geranium is just as native in Mississippi as it is in the Carolinas. 

There are about 300 species of clover around the world with most of them held in high regard. Even the ones we call weeds in lawns would be welcome in pastures as livestock feed. 

Clover is a legume, creating underground nitrogen from air and sharing that nitrogen with the roots of neighboring plants. 

By the way, all clover species are within the genus Trifolium, which means “three leaves.”  A four leaf clover really is rare.

To me, annual bluegrass is a worse weed than the aforementioned broadleaf weeds. Don’t think of the weedy bluegrass we have here as the same as Kentucky bluegrass, versions of which are favored lawn turf in cooler climates. 

The local weedy one grows in clumps and when a clump finally dies out in hot weather, the brown clump stays around a while. 

I’m told a golf ball rolling down a fairway or across a green can change trajectory if it encounters even a mowed clump of annual bluegrass.

No bluegrass species is blue. All are green. 

The native perennial version has purplish buds before flowering that, from a distance, temporarily give a blue tint to a field of the grass. 

The story goes early travelers and settlers referred to the “blue grass of Kentucky.”

I’ve joined the majority and merely mow winter weeds early in the spring for a management method. I’d still spray individual clumps of bad boy perennial cool weather weeds like curly dock, but everything else just gets mowed.

Terry Rector is spokesman for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District.