Weeding out the week

Sunday may be the sabbath, but my work for the last two days has been a rather solid session of weeding.   A pleasant task if you start early enough in the morning, or wait until the sun leaves the lilac bed and under the wisteria before you get settled into a steady rhythm of pulling out weeds.

It’s one of those instant result things: perfectly neat crops emerge from the thicket of pesky weeds.   And my mania for straight rows tends to come out in the pictures.  My happiest result is finding that almost all the pasnips I sowed have germinated.   I couldn’t remember what parsnip seedlings looked like, so I had to wait until lots of exciting weeds germinated in the same area and then try and guess.  

And it wasn’t that hard. The parsnip leaves are thick and glossy and weeds never grow in such straight lines.

I know it’s mad but I have to start cramming the crops in now: and I have sixty cleome flowers to fit in somewhere.   As this onion and garlic bed may be the first to clear in June, I thought this might be a good place to plunk the flowers.

I never counted on cleomes germinating as they are maddingly difficult. They either germinate quickly and then rot, or just sulk so long in the pots that you give up and relegate them to the far distant corner of the potting bench and forget to water them.   But with a great amount of dumb luck I have sixty of them, up and bursting.   So they are going to sit next to the parsnips for a bit.   I don’t think it’s a combo ever been attempted before, but we shall see.   And with all the self sown cosmos popping up everywhere in this vegetable bed it may be a riot of colour later.

I put in the night scented stocks that were getting leggy in their pots. They are crammed around the parsley, oregano and a few lilies in the bean andpea quadrant.   And added lots of coriander confetti plants to the edge of the climbing beans.   Shade is going to help them from bolting, but I have no idea if I’ll get enough height and bulk from the beans to warrant this planting scheme. It was a day of we shall see.

The most challenging project has been to weed what I call the stipa bed. It’s the annoying patch at the end of the lawn that divides the vegetable garden from the rest.   And I had plans for a large thicket of verbena bonariensis to deliniate the two. Lots of plants up in the first year, lots of cuttings taken in the autumn to add to the hedge in the spring.   But the cuttings rotted and froze, and the hedge has not worked.   I’ve lost eighty percent of the plants this winter. And I know they are short lived perennials,but they just don’t self seed as well as I had hoped.   I weeded very carefully along the hedge edge and made sure I didn’t yank out any of the babies,  but there’s still only a few spots of vb among the very bald patch.

This area is crying out for a more evergreen hedge.   But I am reluctant to commit to something that will be invasive, have roots that dry out the soil, and steal light from the vegetable garden.   I’m leaning towards a beech hedge. But may just go for a line of euphorbia wulfennii plants and link the ones that grow so well at the end of the herb garden.

There are plenty of blank spaces here now that I have weeded. And I do have dozens and dozens of verbena bonariensis seedlings growing away in the potting shed. They germinate like mad in the controlled environment of moist soil in seed trays. So I may try and cram in some of those and gaura plants that I’m growing on as well.  Â  It will solve the August problem of how to make things look pretty, but won’t solve the May and June blank canvas issue.   And because of the spring that lurks nearby on this terrace the plants have to be sun loving and not mind a moist environment as well.   Don’t think there’s a chapter on that in my RHS plant books.

I dead headed most of the tulips which are now over. And tried to halt the advance of ivy and brambles in the lilac bed.

So now, Sunday night I can happily say that most of the areas of the garden are weeded. Lightly.

Next week it’s the mighty mow and strim sessions. And a spot of landscaping of the duck pond area.   And probably more weeding. Those plants tend to pop back up when your back is turned.