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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: couch grass

Nature’s own weedkiller

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in Gardens of Somerset, kitchen garden, new plants, unusual plants

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

bindweed, biological controls, couch grass, ground elder, Mexican marigold, Tagetes minuta, Tyntesfield, weedkillers, weeds

tagetesminutaBefore we leave the veg garden at Tyntesfield, I thought I’d just share this bit of veg-growing geekery: just to demonstrate that it’s not only computer whizzes who get unfeasibly excited at obscure things that mean nothing to anyone else, this little patch of 1.5m high nondescript greenery had me jigging on the spot andĀ getting quietly quite worked up while all around me were just wondering what the heck it was there for and hurrying past to have a look at the pretty orange pumpkins.

This is Tagetes minuta: aka the Mexican marigold. It’s a giant of a thing, well over head height. Unlike other tagetes, its flowers aren’t much to write home about either being small, yellow and nondescript: like ‘an impoverished pale yellow groundsel’ as Chiltern Seeds, one of the few who stock the seed, describe it.

But this in veg-gardening terms is the Hadron Collider of weed control. Totally cutting edge, and the very latest thing.

You see, it’s an allelopath: which is to say it emits powerful chemicals from its roots which inhibit the growth and indeed eventually kill any plants which dare to try and grow nearby.

Great Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest strategy: and coincidentally an effective poison against bindweed, couch grass and ground elder. I haven’t heard whether it tackles mares tail too.

Of course you can’t plant anything else while this natural weedkiller is growing: but if you have an area to clear sow it with Mexican marigold and it’s supposed to be a very effective way of doing it. Certainly better than the usual black plastic (which just makes the roots come to the surface in my experience: you still have to weed them out in the usual way and then they break and come back… you know the drill).

The reason I was getting so excited is because this is the first time I have seen it in action, properly growing in the ground. I don’t have an area in my own garden I can clear to give this a try (despite having the bindweed problem from hell) so I was delighted to find Tyntesfield’s gardeners are carrying out the experiment for me.

They won’t know results until the middle of next year: this has been growing in this patch all this summer and so we’ll have to wait till spring next year to see if the bindweed comes back. I will give them a ring in six months or so and find out how they got on. Watch this space.

 

Making meadows while the sun shines

02 Sunday May 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

couch grass, digging, meadows, Pictorial Meadows

I mentioned a little while ago in one of my endless posts about the on-going saga of the house move that I was stewing up a plan to tart up the neglected central section of my garden with a metaphorical coat of paint in the shape of some annual meadow flower seeds from Pictorial Meadows.

Just to reiterate what a state it was in throughout most of last year, here’s the horror pic again:


I think I referred to the planting of a meadow as ‘a quick fix’. What I had forgotten was that when you decide you’re going to perk up the living room with a quick coat of matt emulsion, and then you get out the gear and start to actually do it, you find that first of all, the corners of the wallpaper need sticking down where they’ve started curling up… then that dent needs filling… and that bit where the kids threw a trainset at the wall and took a chunk out will need repapering altogether, which means I’ll probably end up having to do the whole wall… and in the end you’ve got a huge job on your hands.

So it is with the creation of meadows from scrap land.

On the first occasion when it looked as if it would stay dry for more than six hours – which, it being March, was quite a while later – I sprayed the lot with glyphosate (I am what’s generally known as pragmatically organic – i.e. I’ll avoid chemicals wherever possible but when it’s absolutely necessary, such as clearing weedy ground, I reach for the weedkiller).

And two weeks later the above weedy mess was reduced to this:


Still not pretty, but at least you could imagine you might be able to make something of it now. Good thing too, as by now my little 50g packet of seeds was on my windowsill and calling to me seductively every morning.

Right, I thought, I’ll just hoe up the dead topgrowth and then I can rent a rotavator and have a fun day playing with power tools.

Unfortunately, some of the dead topgrowth proved less than willing to move. So I stuck in a fork to see what was going on. And this is what I found.


Seven year’s worth of couch grass had not been so much as mildly inconvenienced by my single application of glyphosate: though the topgrowth had gone, the roots were hale and hearty and doing a passable impression of spaghetti.

By now I’d run out of time to allow more topgrowth to come through so I could apply a second round of weedkiller: and I’d learned my lesson from a certain TV gardener who has never quite lived down his decision to rotavate an allotment containing couch grass roots (which, I understand, he has now sensibly abandoned so someone else can dig them out properly). So – with a wistful glance in the general direction of the hire shop – I’m getting behind my trusty digging fork and painstakingly, painfully doing it all by hand.

Two hour-long sessions later – it’s 15ft x 30ft, so we’re not talking small patch here – and here’s what it’s looking like:


Nearly there. Hopefully I shall be able to bring you some prettier pictures soon. And next time I start wittering on about how easy something’s going to be, bop me over the head or something until I start talking sense again.

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