Murder on my mind.....

Icyalittle - I do have my fair share of weeds and tough thugs, it's true! All I can do with bracken is pull it out as soon as I see it, but I know that isn't really dealing with the problem.

And I have two rowans in my garden - one is a little one still, but I do love them. I'd also love annodomini's yellow-berried rowan - wish I'd planted that instead of the usual variety, pretty though it is!

I have a yellow-berried rowan which the birds ignore until every red berry in the village has been consumed. Then the blackbirds take over and by Christmas it's usually been stripped.

Joseph has the most brilliant autumn colour, and we also had a pink berried one in our Leics garden I really loved- not much good for the birds, they left the fruit- but pink fruit left on the tree in autumn was gorgeous.

Is Cole's still opened on the Uppingham Road?

Rowantree I really sympathise. You seem to have the lot!
(Mind you, I would love a rowantree in my garden ).

Mamie's zapper looks brilliant. I've added it to my birthday list although it's a while away yet. I wonder if it'll work on slugs!

I've never seen so many dandelions in our garden as this year! Most 'weedy' flowers I don't mind, but I hate dandelions...

DH has been digging out our wild garlic - it's gradually overwhelmed all the lovely wood anenomes we used to have in our woodland garden And I can empathise with those complaining about celandines and Spanish bluebells. We have celandine in our borders, even though I thought I'd got rid of it last year - grrrrr! Spanish bluebells are a threat to the native ones and though it's not too difficult to tell them apart from English, the problem comes when they hybridise and you get plants which have characteristics of both - making it almost impossible to keep them at bay.
We also have an advancing army of bracken and all I can do is pull out each frond as I see it appear - and it seems to do that overnight!

Also battling: bindweed, bramble (the latter all very well in the wild bits of the garden, not so good in the border

Posted too early.
I have a big pump up sprayer with a long lance which has a gadget that directs the weed killing spray to just where you want it or just cut the base off an old plastic plant pot, put it over the particular plant you want to kill and direct the spray onto that plant only.

I think the dab on the weed gels are appallingly expensive compared with a spray you can direct onto individual weeds.

Also do buy the generic Glyphosate rather than the expensive branded versions such as Round Up.

It is a heck of a lot cheaper. (Like generic own brand pain killers.)

Bluebells are out here now in the woods.

I used to try to fight them but accept them now as a herald of warmer weather (and I can't get down to dig them out so easily now).

More bluebells would be nice, we have a few under the ancient hedge.

Glyphosate rules OK. My Garden has got into a big mess as my gardening last year was interrupted by shoulder problems.

This year I have done a lot of Glyphosating of the tougher perennial weeds as a damage limitation exercise, to stop the problem from getting worse while I work my way around the garden trying to get it back under control.

I see no other way around the problem. I think that on the whole Glyphosate is a relatively benign herbicide which degrades quite rapidly in the soil.
Do not get me started on b*** vine weevils and Lily beetles though.

That's what I said earlier, rose. They are a woodland plant which only flowers for a couple of months. If your garden has lots of celandine or bluebells, it was probably part of a woodland area before the house was built.
We used to live in an area called Botanic Gardens. We used to give loads of bluebells and celandine to anyone who asked. The bluebell woods are just starting now, and should look amazing any week now.

We have loads of celandines in the lawn and they try to overtake the borders. The lawn is a lost cause, but I do try to get them out of the borders. The one thing about them is that they die back completely so they are not there in the summer to get in the way of the summer plants.

Re nettles, here is why it is good to leave a patch- if you have the space of course:

www.nettles.org.uk/nettles/wildlife.asp

I have an area under some shrub roses where I leave the ground elder alone. It makes very good ground cover and I just have to make sure it doesn't spread into the adjacent mixed border by yanking clumps of it out every now and again. Fortunately our fen soil is light enough to make weeding an fairly easy task.

I too have learned to live with weeds.

I am trying very hard to become much more philosophical about weeds- they can rule your life, and I won't let them. Which does not mean I've given up the fight- but our grass here will always be grass and not lawn- and I accept that it may be much better for biodiversity I am fortunate to have enough space in a field next to our garden to allow big patches of nettles to develop, as nettles are absolute key to several kinds of butterlfies and other insects- without nettles our garden would not be full of butterflies.

And I don't fight any longer to try and keep species which are not suited to our mountain conditions- again it is just too time and spirit consuming- and accept we have enough species which love it up here not to try and keep others which are not. I use cheap alcohol vinegar for weeds in cracks or paving- it works a treat, cheap and very effective- no good in border though.

I also imported ground elder when we moved in a rush from UK to here- and by gum could I kick myself about that- those roots are ********
Apparently edible, so will try to make nettle and ground elder soup soon- to go with the wild St Georges mushroom growing in a huge fairy ring in our field. Now about coïncidences- at our last house in the UK which had a huge ring of those delicious mushrooms in the North-Eastern corner or our garden- which we shared with the pub next door and spilt by a Yew Hedge- and by pure fluke, we have a huge one in the NE corner of our field here too

We've just built a stumpery. It's not exactly Highgrove but I'm quite chuffed with it. There's a nearby stand-pipe which will be useful for keeping the ferns healthy because we have a dry garden. There is also a nearby water butt.

I'm working on the 'woodland floor' this morning. We already have hellebores, vinca minor, snowdrops and tellima grandiflora. There is space around the edge for........drum roll........a clump of celandines.

Off to do some transplanting....

Icyalittle I'm taking note about the celandine!!

I like to put something in my green bin to make it worth their while driving two miles to empty it. Nettles, nettles and more nettles. Everything else goes on my compost heap.

Merlot, you and Brenda need to get together; nettle and wild garlic soup is delicious.
My neighbour swears the ground elder in his garden came from my garden. Not true, as there was none in here until a year ago. We had a lot of ground elder in the house before last. We found the easiest way to get rid of it was to put old carpets over the top of it. It grew to the light but the stems and roots were very long and weak, and the soil was damp, so it was easy to pull out. Your garden does not look so good for a couple of years, but it's worth it.

Ground elder is another nightmare. I imported some from our last garden by mistake. I moved so many plants I didn't notice it was lurking in a pot. I don't find it difficult to dig up but it soon comes back again.

My nettles are legendary and have even featured at the Chelsea Flower show!

I've got celandine plants all around the birders and in cracks between stone pavers in the kitchen garden. They look so sunny and bright, I like having them there......unlike the blasted ground elder that is trying to take over!

If they are woodland plants, what are they doing strangling all my herbaceous plants in my wide open borders? A weed is a plant in the wrong place: these are weeds, trust me!

www.andrewspink.nl/ranunculus/wordsworth.htm

Wordsworth wrote three poems about it. No idea why three.

Just been taking photos of Celandine with grandson. They are not weeds, they are woodland plants, on my Woodland Trust swatch book. They only flower for a couple of months anyway, unlike buttercups.