Garden Centre

Friday, July 6, 2007

Dealing with perennial weeds

Let me share with you one of the unfairest facts about wet summers. It’s not the horrible weather; the need to pull on boots and waterproofs when we should be gardening in shorts and sandals; the rust and blight that strike favourite flowers and crops – it’s this: perennial weeds grow faster in wet weather than cultivated plants. This means that horrors like convolvulus arvensis (bindweed) as shown above, take over and romp across the borders like nasty invading aliens for whom we haven’t yet found the answer (and the common cold, the convenient alien destroyer in 'War of the Worlds', is more likely to strike us in a wet garden than our weeds).

And bindweed is a monster because the roots can extend down fifteen feet or more and the plants can grow from even the smallest bit of left behind root. It is said that by persistent digging and hoeing (and digging and hoeing and digging and hoeing) you can eradicate bindweed and its even nastier relative, bellweed, in a couple of years – but so what? New colonies can establish from seed or from roots on neighbouring land and hover on your boundaries just waiting to invade.

So what can you do?

Fork up and remove as much of the root as possible when carrying out autumn and winter digging. In spring as new growth appears, dig out new shoots. Where you can’t dig without disturbing plant roots, sever the weed at ground level with a hoe. It’s a satisfying sort of guillotine process and it’s a good thing it is satisfying as it needs to be repeated throughout the growing season as new growth reappears – in my garden, about every second day, in fact! If you’re not organic, you can try using glyphosate, which is a non-selective total weedkiller applied to the foliage, where it is transmitted throughout the plant’s system, disrupting cellular processes until the plant dies. Now, apart from being a chemical control, which is not permitted to organic gardeners, the fact that it’s non-selective means that neighbouring plants will die just as fast as your weeds if they are touched by the spray. In addition, it’s important to have good leaf coverage so that as much chemical is absorbed as possible by the plant. I'll stick with my hoe, thank you!

Labels: bindweed, garden tasks, garden weeds, perennial weeds, weeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 6:23 AM 0 Comments

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