Covering up

One of the questions asked by the RSPB when you send in your Big Garden Birdwatch results is whether you have a wildlife area in your garden.  Do I?  I answered that I did, though it’s not so much an ‘area’ as the whole garden.  To be honest, most of the garden is more than a bit wild.  In fact some of it is overrun with weeds.  Every year I vow to get on top of this, with mixed results.  So I’ve taken an opportunity to take at least some steps towards improving matters.

We recently received a very large parcel (a painting) sent from abroad, which had navigated its way through the Christmas post and, eventually, two months later, turned up in our village (at the wrong house, but that’s another story).  The senders had wrapped it lavishly in several layers of bubblewrap and packaged it up with a number of large sheets of cardboard.  The bubblewrap was salvaged to be used next winter to insulate the greenhouse (which has had no insulation this winter, and the temperature dropped to minus 3.9C at one point).  But the real gold dust, from the gardening point of view, was the cardboard.

Cardboard, as any no-dig gardener will tell you, is wonderful stuff in the garden.  I have been known to scavenge in the supermarket for old wine boxes to flatten out and add to my stash.  It has to be carefully chosen, with no shiny plasticky coating, which will flake off and leave a trail of coloured confetti across the garden that won’t break down.  Laid out on the ground, cardboard can be used to smother weeds, at least temporarily; the longevity of this effect depends on what else you put on top (and you need something on top, if only to weigh it down and stop it blowing away, at least in this windy garden).  This year I’ve managed to collect quite a lot of it; some was used in the autumn to cover the path along the long hedge, with the hedge clippings just dropped on top of it.  There’s a fairly dense layer of conifer prunings covering it up and keeping it in place.

The fruit bed path

Another such path – which had been allowed to get overgrown in the past couple of years – is the one through the fruit area, between the raspberries and gooseberries.   I don’t think I’ve ever covered up the whole length of it before, but the new cardboard allowed me to do exactly that.  The far end, round the fig plant up against the wall, got a layer of compost on top of the cardboard, to keep the weeds down and to feed the plant, while the rest of the run now has a covering of more evergreen hedge prunings, including some quite large chunks.  I hope it’ll keep the grass and other things at bay, allowing me to do more targeted weeding among the fruit bushes as time allows.

Some other, smaller, pieces of cardboard are used from time to time on the veg garden paths, with woodchip on top, making a more decorative effect.  There’s more work to be done here, but last week I tackled a job that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, which is to lay a new entrance path to the veg plot.  The old entrance was halfway along the outer bed, which had the benefit of symmetry and looked good on paper, but in practice meant ducking and diving under the apple tree, especially when this was fruiting and the branches were pulled down low.  The new plan is to have two entrances, one further down past the apple tree, which is already in place but not woodchipped, and one this side of the tree, where I naturally want to enter the plot most of the time.  So a new pathway was dug, edged, lined with cardboard and finished off with woodchip (as was the other path).  The new one is just visible in the photo below, on the right.

Ready for courgettes?

Alongside this, the outer bed had become seriously overgrown as the neighbouring grasses had moved in.  So: a layer of more cardboard, another layer of compost (old hotbin contents, mostly composted but quite suitable for this purpose), and a covering of black plastic, well weighed down.  The plastic will stay there for the rest of the year, though I might plant courgettes through it in due course.  This is the full no-dig way of dealing with weeds and, although it doesn’t cover the whole of the bed, it should make a big difference.

The biggest pieces of cardboard were reserved for the gas tank bed.  This area is A Problem.  The ground is seriously stony, even for this stony-soil garden – probably builders’ rubble from the house extension work that the previous owners had done – and you just can’t dig or even fork it.  There’s a mahonia which suckers half-heartedly through the soil, a few cotoneasters which have self-seeded from other plants in our garden and the neighbours’, and a philadelphus; they were probably intended to screen the gas tank (but don’t).  Fortunately a couple of holly plants have seeded themselves at the edge, which will eventually provide a better screen.  And the whole area is completely overrun with ground elder.  I’ve had some success hand-weeding the ground elder in the past, but it’s a laborious job and too much work in such a large area.  It can be knocked back with glyphosate, but I’ve stopped using this and in any case it’s always on the verge of being banned.  The young ground elder shoots are supposed to be edible, but how much can anyone eat?  So I’m hoping that a layer of cardboard will, at the very least, curb its enthusiasm.  The presence of the shrubs makes it impossible to cover the whole area, but I’ve made a start.  The top layer is a messy heap of old plant material and wood ash, and more conifer prunings; it’s not pretty, but it will buy me some time, and allow the gas man access to the tank!

Not pretty, but ...

Colourful sunsets last week – caused by dust from the Sahara, apparently.