Garden Centre

Friday, August 10, 2007

Mythtakes version 2

While I’m on the subject – mulches! You may be wondering why I’m in such a rotten mood, and the answer is simple, for complicated reasons I can’t actually get out into my garden to do any gardening, which makes me bad-tempered and when I get bad-tempered I find my garden thoughts turn negative which is probably why Dickens wrote, ‘He saw that men who worked hard, and earned their scanty bread with lives of labour, were cheerful and happy; and that to the most ignorant, the sweet face of Nature was a never-failing source of cheerfulness and joy.’ in The Pickwick Papers – it really can ruin your day when you can’t get out there and do a bit of weeding!

Anyway, weeding (or the lack of it) turned my mind to mulches and that reminded me of this sad effort. I blame television. Seriously, I do. If it wasn’t for all those gardening make-over programmes that show a happy bunch of gardeners making a ‘weed-free’ garden in twenty minutes flat, then we wouldn’t see pathetic gardens like this, where pebble mulch is being overrun by the world's worst weeds.

You see, simple statements like ‘Mulch your borders with a three inch layer of bark to prevent weeds from colonising’ sound jolly, don’t they? It seems as if all you have to do is fling bags of bark mulch around and your problems are over.

Not True!

What you need to do before you get to the bark chucking stage of mulching is this:

1 - Remove annual weeds in the border by hand pulling or hoeing – in other words, before you mulch you have to be rid of any annual seeding plants like groundsel
2 - Lever up perennial weeds from the border with a hand fork or special weeding tool, ensuring every piece of root is removed – that’s your daisies, your dandelions, couch grass and bindweed. Note those seven words ‘ensuring every piece of root is removed’ because some weeds will punch through a concrete slab, let alone a layer of mulch.
3 - Scrape weeds or moss from between gaps in paving with an old knife – because otherwise they creep UNDER the mulch and appear in new places you never expected
4 - Cover large areas of bare soil with plastic, landscape fabric or an old roll of carpet to prevent weeds from germinating in spring, or pin down mulch fabric in perpetuity, cutting an X to allow plants to poke through. Note pin down – it means you have to staple the edges right into the soil, not just cover them in mulch and hope for the best.

Now you can fling your mulch … if you want to. Personally I prefer to take a hoe out to my soil and decapitate all the weeds. It means my soil remains sweet and friable, not damp and compacted like soils under mulch and it means I can dig in compost so the earth doesn’t become exhausted – you can’t do that with three inches of bark chippings in the way.

Labels: garden makeovers, garden weeds, mulch, perennial weeds

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:51 AM 0 Comments

---

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

---