Saturday, July 08, 2006

Weeds where do they all come from!

Spent noon to seven in the evening on Saturday weeding!
All my compost bins are full, I have had to resort to a pile next to the bins and hope that what is inside will reduce in bulk quicker than the heap starts to decompose.
Where did I get them all from? From the spuds, the poor benighted spuds.
Top three Fat Hen, Sow Thistle and something I must ask the resident experts on Kitchen Garden Forum about when I get a picture of one to post up, it has a rosette of hairy leave from which springs a two foot stalk with occasional leaves and topped by a spray of tiny yellow flowers.
And I have still not finished, one inter-row length on plot seventeen and six rows on plot eighteen to do.
On plot seventeen the earthed up rows are pretty clean of weeds, but the inter-row ground has fat hen and sowthistle in abundance. I have to use a trowel to get the sowthistle out as it snaps too easily. I have even re-done the earthing up on five of the ten original rows, nine now left as I finished digging up the tenth for tea that night, yum.
On plot eighteen, as I am effectively clearing it properly for the first time in years the weed problem is much worse. The previous tenant cut some beds in the couch and dug alot, throwing the couch roots into piles at one end of the plot, grrrr. Despite my standard first strike of glyphosate, burner, glyphosate, some bindweed has survived, it always does though. The main problem is the disturbed dormant weed seeds, sowthistle by the ton, weed No-3 by the kiloton, some thistle, even some seedling stinging nettle.
Fortunately I thought ahead and spaced the rows widely enought to get the 350 down between them and have done so at least twice since planting, result very few weeds in the inter-row gaps, most are rooted in the loose earthed up soil. I only managed two of the thirty foot rows though, six to go although I did six foot at the lower end of each where they met the overwintering onion bed.
Great disparity in the top-growth, the two full rows are green and strong, some of the other six are yellow weak and floppy, tried a strong watering on the cleared ends to see if this improves things, if not I'll try a soluble feed as well.
Aside from the spuds, I have weeded the over-wintering onions, some of which are looking really good, the sweetcorn and my lad's corner, where bless him he had been carefully nurturing some weeds in with his crops.
My wages for all this hard work, a sunburnt strip on my "builders bum", note to self, wear a longer top when weeding.
Why all this weeding, allotment competition judging next week.

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