Weeds

It may seem odd to give the weeds of my garden, but every gardener has to learn their weeds! These weeds grow in my garden, but it will vary with soil, etc.

A weed is something that you don't want growing in your garden, or at least, you don't want growing in that particular position. For example, potatoes can be grown as a crop, but with crop rotation, next year you will plant something else there, and yet there will be a few missed tubers growing where they shouldn't. Raspberries spread outwards, and end up where they shouldn't, so do strawberries. There are many flowers (some listed below) which seed widely, and need to be weeded in some places, while cherished in others. Indeed, I encourage such flowers - free plants! Our aunt used to call them "volunteers".

Weeds spread in two ways. There are plants which seed, and those that spread through roots. If a plant seeds, then you do need to weed it before it flowers, or at least, before it sets seed. There is a saying "One year's seeding, seven year's weeding", which I find very depressing. Other plants spread through roots, and those you must weed by removing as much of the root as you can. The roots grow quickly, and may entangle each other, so this can be hard. But merely pulling up the plants above soil, and leaving the root still there does no good at all. Of course, the roots may go down too far to find, or come from under a paving stone, or from your neighbours, and then there is nothing you can do except remove as much root as you can.

You weed by (trying to) remove the weeds. But that involved knowing which the weeds are! In the flower garden, nearly all of my plants are established, and fairly large, so anything small is a weed (although I have to be careful not to remove seedlings of plants I want to keep). However, in the vegetable garden, all plants are annuals, and the good seedlings come up at the same time as the weeds. This is why you plant in rows, with a stick at the end of each row. The vegetable seedlings come up in these rows, so you can identify them, and anything else is a weed, and should be removed. However, you will get to know your persistent and aggressive weeds by their appearance and leaf shape. There is a distinct category of "Kill on sight!" of the weeds that I really don't want in my garden, which get removed even while I am wandering down the garden.

Some authorities advise that you don't put weeds on compost heaps. Both weed seeds and weed roots can get spread over your garden when you spread the compost. However, a lot of my compost is weeds, so it seems a shame to waste those! I must admit that there is a flush of weeds in the spring after the winter compost, but those are easy to remove. I do tend to put roots such as bindweed and ground elder in the green bin (garden waste bin) because I have found long healthy roots cheerfully growing in the compost, and it's tedious to remove them when spreading the compost.

I don't use weed killer, as we wish to encourage insects (for my husband to photograph).

Aggressive - spreads through seeds:

Alkanet