My philosophy on weeding

Talking about my efforts last week to remove violets and ivy from under the apple trees generated an interesting conversation about the weeds whose presence we disliked the most in our gardens.

Is your garden suffering from a weed takeover? Are you wondering how to get rid of weeds, permanently? Although it’s a fiddly task, getting rid of your weeds sensibly and efficiently will see them off in no time. Here’s how to do it, with help from our gardening experts. First, Identifying the Problem Like any plant, weeds can be annual or perennial.

5 Ways to Get Rid of Weeds Without Pulling Them Are you tired of hand-pulling weeds? Try these different techniques you may or may not have heard of for controlling weeds in your garden. Try these five methods to get rid of weeds without hand-pulling!

After a summer of volatile weather, gardens up and down the country blossomed and bloomed — often with weeds more than plants.

Many of the worst garden weeds can quickly take over your garden during the growing season. Weeds start growing earlier in the year than many garden plants, in early spring – so be sure to get on top of them early before they get out of hand.

Weed control is essential because it can hamper a plant’s growth in your garden. You can easily kill them using these easy Homemade Weed Killer Ideas! However, do bear in mind that these ideas are more on the organic side, and will be less effective than the chemicals ones.

In times past, blackberries were deliberately used as hedging plants, and their prickles make them a very good intruder deterrent if you have an open boundary. They have also been used in herbal medicine. Chewing blackberry leaves was said to soothe a toothache, and frozen blackberries are great for soothing a sore throat or a tickly cough.

The stinging nettle Urtica dioica is one of the easiest plants to identify – a quick brush past it and you’ll certainly know that you’ve found one! This tough perennial that can reproduce by seeds and by spreading roots is hard to eradicate from the garden, but in times past its virtues were far more valued than they are today.

The allotment is having to take care of itself for a while, as I’m concentrating on finishing my dissertation. It’s going down nature’s preferred route for taking care of unused soil, and covering itself in weeds. Come September I’m going to have my work cut out getting them under control….

The new grapevines I ordered (from Victoriana Nursery Gardens) arrived last week. The planters for them should arrive this week…. I want the vines to grow over the arbour, and we’ve chosen a pair of wooden planters that can be fixed to the arbour, so that the whole lot can be moved together should the need ever arise. The vines are going to be long-term residents of the garden, after all. It won’t be too long before I can enjoy cooking with vine leaves, although a decent crop of seedless dessert grapes might take a little longer.

I love books about weeds and wild plants – they generally contains little gems of fascinating information about useful and edible plants, tidbits you don’t find in gardening manuals. It’s been a while since I had the chance to sit down and peruse a good book, so it was great to be offered a review copy of Wonderful Weeds by Madeleine Harley, which has the subtitle “an extensive and fully illustrated guide from seedlings to fruit.”

There are plenty of signs of new life in the garden at the moment, with bulbs pushing up and buds fattening up. And the surface of the compost in my containers is turning green. This precocious leafy growth is courtesy of hairy bittercress, Cardamine hirsuta, a small and speedy weed that’s pretty much everywhere.