Spring might be a time when everything I want to see growing quickly is belting along as hoped for, but the sad fact is that all the plants which I'd be delighted to see keeling over are in fact some of the healthiest, most vigorous things out there. They're the weeds, the rotten things.
I'm an early riser, and like to spend a bit of time every morning checking on the garden, but that pleasant little ramble often as not means I end up pulling out more weeds. It's a never-ending chore, and while I hate the weeds in one way I do have a grudging admiration for their tenacity and survival smarts.
This isn't a new photo, but as it's the Mother of All
Onion Weeds ever dug up from my garden, I'll use it
again, as it shows what we're up against. Not just one
weed but Mum and a few dozen kiddies.
Dig Mum out of the ground and dozens of bulblets
quickly jesttison from the Mother Ship, staying behind
in the soil, ready to start up another colony.
Now, the truly despicable thing about onion weed is that the bulbs don't all sprout at once. If, for example, there are 100 bulbs in a given patch of soil, you won't see all 100 come up at once. Instead, they come up in dribs and drabs over all four seasons. What a sneaky trick!
I'm not a fan of using weedkillers such as glyphosate sprays (Zero, Roundup) in my garden beds, so I still soldier on digging out onion weed. When I spot a plant I dig deep, taking up not just the weed and its bulb, but a good-sized clump of soil around it. It's not a perfect method and a few do come back up, but not so energetically as before. When digging over all the different garden beds for this recent revamp, dozens and dozens and dozens of onion weed civilisations fell... and yet they're still coming back now, if not as strong as before. As I said, never ending story.
The other major pest here is oxalis, both
the type with bulbs at the base...
...and the multi-branching types with
the super-long taproots. Both are truly
despicable weeds which have a
permanent lease over my garden.
I think I am actually slowly breeding up a new, nastier, uber-oxalis over time. I've noticed that the light green oxalis pictured here, which is fairly easy to see, is becoming outnumbered by a darker-leaved type which is much harder to see – and I must be leaving behind more often as I weed my way around the place. Serves me right, I should just let this light green oxalis take over the garden and count myself lucky!
I really could turn my garden into a weed display village in fact, despite my diligence with the weeding fork every morning. Yes, we also have some superb little displays of tradescantia (wandering jew), pellitory (asthma weed), dandelions, chick weed clusters, plus several other little low-growing horrors which colonize cracks in paving and spread from there. Don't know all their names, unfortunately.
All I can do is pull 'em out when I see them, and keep on pulling them out. It's a never-ending story.
