My Garden Story

Weeds

Let’s get this over with. My gardener uses Roundup, so any reader who is outraged by this need read no further. Dandelions and thistles only occur in odd patches and can be dug out.  Onion weed is a different matter. All those tiny bulblets that are impossible to get by pulling and digging always seems to leave enough in the ground for the next crop. Then there is the Sticky weed, Galium Aparine, so-called because it clings to everything. It is an annual and grows very rapidly. There are other little creeping things, one that clings to the soil with a tiny yellow flower that I haven’t been able to identify. Couch and crabgrass are a nuisance; there is a tall rush that multiplies without warning, and somebody once said my gully would look pretty with a few buttercups! He dug some up from beside the road and planted them near the little stream. They started popping up in the garden as well and grew very quickly so had to be removed as soon as possible.  However, for rapid and invasive growth, nothing beats the Evening Primrose. Yes, it needs capital letters. I didn’t know this, and I thought it was a pretty pink, so I bought a couple of small plants and within a week I had half an acre. It spread as I watched and had to be eradicated. Occasionally while visiting a garden, I see a patch in the flower bed. I am tempted to say to the owner “do you know what this plant does next?”  but I don’t.

Most of these weeds can be dug up, except for the onion weed. There are various remedies such as pouring boiling water on them, smothering them with mulch, wait until they flower and then cut the flowers off so they can’t set seeds, cut the flowers off and spray the stems with a weed killer which is my preferred method as if done at the right moment  with Roundup or Zero will reach the roots. It may take years to get rid of it, it did here, but I haven’t seen any this year.

Pests.

Number one on the list is rabbits.  Followed at a short distance by rose pruning and fruit eating rosellas, and the white cockatoos who descend en masse to pick daffodils, nip the flowers off the white magnolia, rip the bark off the gum trees where they roost so the rain gets in and rots the branch which then drops in the gust of wind. The birds then fly off to settle on another branch and do the same thing.  They are completely fearless and no amount of shouting will deter them from their play. For a while there was a wombat who liked to dig holes in the garden and rest there squashing whatever he/she sat on. It always followed the same routine and would end the visit by crapping on the laundry steps. Always in the same place which, while I love wombats, I did not find endearing. There are the snails which invade my hostas and sorrel, but they get bait. We all have snails, they live under pot plants and appear in droves after rain.

Rabbits are in a class of their own. The local council has no interest in controlling them and no virus is effective for long. My garden is not fenced, and I don’t have a dog, so they can have a free-for-all in it and they do. Rabbits ringbark small trees, eat new green shoots, echinacea, rudbeckia, the entire crop of dahlias, and one year we planted 100 ranunculus and they ate the lot. I had a fine group of acanthus mollis at one time, and they too, helped by snails, were all eaten to the ground. I have spent a couple of years making a list of what they don’t eat and gradually planting the garden as rabbit proof as possible, with iris, liliums, salvia and hellebores. Miscanthus replaces lost trees, and I can tuck a patch of lily-of-the-valley under a viburnum opulus and it survives, being poisonous.  It has been trial and error. They are as bold as brass and lie about on the lawn, nibbling grass in the early morning and late evening. I have a Siamese cat who does her best to reduce the population but its not enough.  I had a neighbour for a while who offered to shoot them – he was a farmer so he had a shotgun. “Thank you Noel, I said, but I don’t think that’s a very good idea, you can’t discharge a firearm in a built-up area.”  I sounded pompous, but who knows where a stray bullet could end up, particularly in our street with children on ponies and bikes, dog walkers and just walkers.  I’ve got a silencer, he said. I thanked him politely and fenced off the most vulnerable areas.  The man at Bunnings recommended some fencing he used, it has to be so high, he said and you’ve got to dig it in a long way or they’ll burrow underneath it. The gardener I had at that time was not keen on the idea of all that digging, so we got some smaller fencing and of course, they just hopped over the top of it.

Most people I know use some sort of weed and pest control, and unless you are genuinely rewilding or creating native creatures’ habitats, makes sense to me.

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Next time, fruit, veg and herbs