Boys are different, part 2

Michael, age 3, with his weapon of choice

Another thing girls won't do: viciously attack weeds with a hand-held garden fork.  Michael helped me weed yesterday.  Whenever I pulled up a weed I would toss it to Michael, who would pounce on it like a starved cat onto an injured mouse.  He would then use his little garden fork/cultivator to repeatedly pound the weed into the ground shouting, "Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!"  When he was done, the weed would be nothing but dirt and little pieces of green confetti.

I then let him loose in the vegetable bed that hasn't been planted yet (except for one part that has some seeds, which Michael knows not to bother) to go take care of some weeds for me.  Using his little fork, he's able to chop those weeds right out of the ground.  After just a few minutes he had taken care of all the weeds in the vegetable garden.  I didn't let him weed in the flower garden.  I foresaw too much collateral damage with his particular weeding technique.

I thought about telling Michael we're not killing, we're weeding.  But really, we're killing weeds, right?  And just the other day I read in a gardening blog by Owen Dell that addressed this fact rather well:

The Gentle Art of Gardening? My foot. If weeds are to be counted as plants then we kill far more than we grow, do we not? If insects are among the wildlife we claim to love, then we must include genocide among our activities. We pinch, prune, shear, slash, chop, dig up, bury, squash, graft, coppice, espalier, pollard, girdle, tie up, tie down, stake, eradicate, poison, drown, trap, suffocate, and just plain murder. The monstrous things we do to plants and insects would land us in prison if we did them to a puppy.

So Michael and I are both weed killers.  Michael just enjoys it more.