Weeding the Web

A Good Weed: Weeds by John Walker

There couldn't be much more difference between my garden and those on either side. I'm exceptionally laissez-faire about weeds, or Interesting Plants as I describe them when defending the somewhat shaggy, overcrowded look of the beds. Meanwhile, my neighbours amble around their garden, spray bottle in hand, eyes on the exposed soil, ready to squirt anything undesirable.

Of course, some might point out their patience. Fewer weeds on my side of the fence might reduce the use of weedkiller on theirs. But...why use chemicals when you can pull something out?

And need it be pulled out in the first place?

This is definitely a question you'll be asking yourself on reading John Walker's Weeds, to be released at the end of this month. Weeds are, it quickly becomes clear, there for a reason. After all, where is soil naturally bare, and what moves in first to newly bare soil when, say, the wind has torn a tree out by the roots?

Weeds aren’t there to deliberately frustrate our gardening efforts; they are simply doing their job. Just as new skin forms after we’ve caught ourselves on a rose thorn, weeds help heal wounds in the earth. Look at it another way: it’s us who are causing the problem by insisting on bare, neat-looking soil – open wounds, if you like.

And, points out John, bare soil not only sends earthworms deeper to escape the sun, but also microscopic organisms - all of which are necessary to create good soil. It begins to be clear that in fighting weeds, we're not only never going to finish the battle, but are actually potentially doing harm.

Early chapters celebrate the success of weeds - how they spread (useful for understanding how to control them), their contribution to wildlife, what they tell us (do you, for example, take their appearance as an indicator of when it's warm enough to sow in spring?) and how we can live with them. 

An alternative title could easily have been Working with Weeds. After reading, I found myself checking through the beds, looking at weeds more closely and assessing them more carefully. Observing weeds gives us information on the soil we have. From there, it's a short step to working out what to do about it. If creeping buttercup (which I have) thrives in moist, poorly drained soil, the answer is obviously to amend the soil so that it's better drained, not labour to remove something that finds it so attractive. Other plants, of course, will thank you for the improved soil and move in, but in my experience, the better the soil, the less obnoxious the weeds and the easier they are to pull up.

Elsewhere you'll find a useful list of weeds to grow in a "bug bank", attracting pollinators to your garden, and one of edible weeds, which I intend to work my way through as I do wonder why I put so much effort into feeding slugs with lettuce when wild saladings are there for the taking.

Once past these chapters, you move into an alphabetical and illustrated directory of sixty common garden weeds, with a traffic-light warning system. John doesn't advocate complete weed freedom but rather containment and judicious choice (he has a Dutch hoe of "razor sharpness" to dispatch the unwanted) so those marked in red should have action taken against them immediately because they're serious perennial weeds, those in amber are moderately easy to control, and green, easy.

Each entry has a clear photograph of the culprit and gives details of how it spreads, where it likes to grow, its habit, and the best way to get rid of it, should you wish to. Entries also note when it's edible or poisonous.

John cleared an overgrown allotment with sheet mulching and was harvesting six months later

The final chapter is dedicated to an earth-friendly approach to preventing, clearing and controlling weeds, which by now, anyway, seem rather less threatening. If you're already familiar with John's approach, you'll know weedkiller is out.

Uprooting a weed, rather than spraying it with some synthetic chemical weedkiller, might not strike you as a profound gesture we gardeners can make to ‘save the planet’, but imagine if hundreds, thousands or millions of gardeners did it: that’s an awful lot of weeds and a mighty amount of weedkiller staying put in its bottle.

Here you'll find plenty of ideas for clearing ground of weeds while barely lifting a fork to do so, rather employing a variety of ways such as mulching, burning, or choking out. Proper attention is paid to effective use of a hoe. There's also sensible advice on how deal with undesirable weeds that are getting the upper hand in a lawn. The chapter winds up with a table of the best methods for attacking weeds in various parts of the garden with page references so you can easily refer back to information earlier in the book.

Experienced, organic gardeners  aren't really the audience for Weeds, although the weed directory is useful and you may well encounter several "I hadn't thought of that" moments. However, if you're feeling your way in gardening or if you're wedded to weedkiller, this is required reading. It makes the taming and maintaining of a garden seem much less of a chore and is likely to open your eyes, not only to a Nature that we can work with, but a Nature that, given a chance, is willing to work with us.

To Order

Weeds was first published in 2003, and this is an updated edition. Pre-order by July 31st from Earth-friendly Gardener (where you can also read an extract) and you'll receive a discount on the £15 cover price, as well as a chance to win a copy of John's excellent How to Create an Eco-Garden.

 

Red Currant, Yellow Currant - heritage tomatoes from Dobies

Back in March I received a surprise package. Dobies sent samples from their new heritage vegetable range, selected by last year's winner of The Great Allotment Challenge, Rob Smith. My bounty included three plants each of Tomato Red Currant and Tomato Yellow Currant, and two Honey Boat squash plants.

Tomato Red Currant from Rob Smith's heritage veg selection from Dobie's

To be honest, I could do with more of this sort of thing. Not that creating a lush plantation on an underspecified windowsill doesn't try the patience of family members when it comes to drawing the curtains. (And lush it was; they took off from the moment I potted them on and I potted on again before daring to put them into their final positions outside.) But it was great to have tomato plants so early as I rarely bother to sow tomatoes until April and certainly not squash, for the very reason that I don't have a greenhouse.

Hence, for me, I am now well ahead of my usual game. This, in a year when I heard the Gardeners' Question Time panel bemoaning the weather and the fact that they hadn't yet harvested tomatoes.

Hah! I preened. I've gathered at least a hundred.

Sounds good, huh? But did you note the name? Red/Yellow Currant. Somehow, I just thought these would be a whimsically named cherry. I was wrong. The names are trade-description accurate, as proven by the redcurrant which kindly agreed to model.

A redcurrant and a Red Currant. Quite a few of the tomatoes are smaller than this one.

There's actually quite a lot to be said for them. Picking is a bit of fiddle, as their size makes them easy to drop and the languishing foliage means that 1) they don't necessarily fall through to the soil and 2) they're hard to find again. Soup, sauce and stuffing are obviously out, but I'm finding it rather seductive to just toss a handful onto a salad without cutting and deseeding. Ditto risottos.

Taste-wise they're lovely warm from the vine, with a good zing to balance the sweetness, their size providing a pop of flavour on the tongue. Out of the fridge? Still zingy, not quite so flavoursome, but that's tomatoes in general.

I seem to be growing from one extreme to the other. Last year was an experiment with Gigantomo, and generally they were more useful. It's a question of balance. Six plants of the two Currants means that I don't have room for many other varieties. One plant wouldn't be enough, I reckon, if you wanted a good showing in salad on a regular basis. But if you have room for two or three, depending on your desire to consume, that would probably be enough to justify them as a tasty, no-preparation addition to your harvest.

Tomato Yellow Currant, available from Dobie's

The Currants are new and exclusive to Dobie's but, given the laissez-faire approach to naming veg varieties, I wouldn't be surprised if the red one were an extremely close relative of Victoriana's Sweet Pea Currant tomato. Their website gives a description which pretty much hits the spot.

We cannot pretend that this is a tidy variety to grow; you are best to just contain the growth within a circle of strings rather than try to formally train and thin.

There was certainly something about my plants which stopped me from growing as a cordon. I just let them get on with it. Branches tend to be long and it's most definitely a sprawler. However, Victoriana does add that, if you do grow as a cordon, you'll have tomatoes more the size of a cherry variety, which might appeal more to some.

Meanwhile Rob Smith, who has, he says, a passion for heritage veg with their overtones of childhood tastes and helping at his grandfather's allotment, has chosen some other tempting varieties for his range from Dobie's.

Honey Boat Squash

I fear I won't be discovering the joys of Honey Boat, though. One plant has romped away with plenty of female flowers but the other (entirely my own fault) is stunted through neglect and only just beginning to flower. On the plant that's thriving, the fruits are withering away. I'll try hand pollination to see if that helps, and perhaps I might get some sort of harvest by the end of the year, but I'm kicking myself for not doing this sooner. as I was really looking forward to trying a squash that promises to be "easier to grow, and sweeter than a butternut squash." Rob adds:

It’s more productive too... The fruits are super sweet with firm, deep orange flesh, the ideal size to serve 2 people. It’s also got its own built-in best before date, as the green stripes will disappear as the squash ages, so you’ll always know which to eat first.

Well, I can certainly confirm there are loads of fruit (all shrivelling). Actually, to add insult to injury, I won't be getting any other squash either. The Turks Turban I bought in to make up for my inadequacies was razed to soil level by voracious molluscs.

Moral: never forget to replace night-time protection, even once.

Ah, well, there's always next year...

 

Licking the Lily Beetle Larvae

Actually, I can't think of anything much more revolting than the literal interpretation of the title of this post. Having spent half an hour de-beetling my lilies, I can safely say it is one of the more repulsive gardening activities. 

The reason, just in case you haven't had the pleasure, is that these grubs cling to the underside (and sometimes the top) of lily leaves, covering themselves in their own excrement and (not so) slowly devouring your plants. They've positively gorged themselves on mine this year, which drove me to take a wooden spatula and scrape them into a yoghurt pot.

As you can see, rather too many of them. All the progeny of the only two adults I captured?

The orange sausage thing is, I think, eggs laid by the lily beetle (lilioceris lilii). So insouciant were they that these were clearly visible on top of a leaf, rather than on the underside. If you think they're something else, then do tell me.

I used to think the beetle's red colouring was rather fetching. Not any more. I'm just pleased they show up so well in readiness for their nemesis.

And my reward? The leaves may look ragged, but the flowers are perfect.

However, no time to sit back and admire. I'm keeping an eagle eye on the lilies. The beetle's lifecycle means that a new generation of adults is likely to appear any time now and I'd like to decimate their numbers before they go into hibernation and reappear around March next year, looking for new juicy leaves, not only of lilies but fritillaries.

If you also suffer with this pest, the RHS would like you to fill in a short lily beetle questionnaire. It's a pest that was pretty much confined to Surrey until, in the mid-80s, it decided to take a hike and spread as far as Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The information received by gardeners eager to share their woe has been collated into an animated map of its reported spread since 1939 - and it's quite a restful 2 mins, if you need a break.

The lily beetle isn't the only pest being monitored. If you suffer rosemary beetle, box tree moth, berberis sawfly or hemerocallis gall midge, you'll find links to questionnaires via the link above.

In the meantime, how are your lilies doing?