Here’s Susan Gibb on reading

As I weed, I am thinking about how I am reading the soil, the dill, the crabgrass. All the years of gardening have taught me to recognize most weeds and vegetables from the time they are only about an eighth of an inch high. I know that weeds sprout and grow faster than most desirable plants, and can soon overtake the especially slow-growing herbs. I used to use a trick in sowing rows, tossing in a few radish seeds along with the rest because they come up quickly and will mark the rows easily before the rest come up. It works, but this tool was interfering with the slower basil; radish grow so quickly that they push everything out of the way, and by the time you pull them, you are as well destroying the basil. The tool then becomes a blockage to good growth, it is in the way.