Harvesting weeds

The builders' sack

One of the difficulties of no-dig gardening is the amount of compost needed to keep the soil in good heart.  There’s no way I can produce enough from my two ‘dalek’ bins and the hotbin (which, after a slow start in spring, I’ve finally got up to a decent temperature); one ‘dalek’ is always slowly cooking away while the other receives kitchen waste and such garden material as I can stuff into it, prior to the contents being transferred to the other bin for longer-term ‘cooking’, but they’re not large enough to produce the necessary volume of compost.  Last year I trialled using an old white plastic builders’ sack which originally arrived with a load of stone chippings for the drive, with reasonable success given the rough nature of much of the material I put into it, and this year it’s back in use, giving me a lot more space in which to compost stuff.  So – I need more stuff to compost.

Charles Dowding, the no-dig guru, runs various courses including one on how to produce compost (in volume).  One of the participants on one of these courses got so enthusiastic about the business of producing compost that he declared that he now regarded his garden as primarily a source of composting material.  My initial reaction was mild horror, but on reflection, I could see the point.  And … I have a garden full of weeds – so why not use the weeds to make compost?

I’ve always put some of my weeds in the compost bins, of course, but the bins don’t reach the sort of temperatures that would destroy seeding flowerheads or perennial roots, so a lot of weeds go into the council waste bin (or, whisper it, over the fence into the field behind if they’re weeds that came into the garden that way in the first place).  But in fact flowerheads should be fine as long as the seeds haven’t matured, and it’s not too onerous to cut off the roots (and any seedheads) and compost the rest. 

Some plants are too small or spindly to be worth the bother, but I’ve been pulling up the chunkier weeds such as ground elder and woundwort – both flowering but not yet seeding – for chopping up and adding to the compost bins.  There are also garden plants going into the mix; the very large and substantial parsley and leaf beet plants that are about to flower, for example.  I’m leaving one plant of each to collect seed from, but they are now too elderly for kitchen use and need removing.  They’re producing a great volume of green matter for composting.  Woody material – an essential addition to any compost mix – is less easy to come by, but prunings from my ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ rose, which keeps flopping across the path, have also been added; it’s not a very thorny rose, and the new growth is easy to cut up.  I also scavenge for any other shrub prunings to add, along with the odd bit of small cardboard.  Material that I can manage to cut up into fairly little pieces goes to the hotbin, but the rougher stuff is heading for the builders’ sack, and I’m hoping for a decent amount of home-produced compost this winter!

Parsley starting to flower ...

... and over-large leaf beet plants!

Pottering

The Bank Holiday weekend wasn’t exactly warm, but there was enough dry weather to get some useful gardening done.  We haven’t had much heat yet this year, but enough to make us believe that there might be some to come eventually.  Right now, it’s wet and windy (again).

The warmer weather, of course, meant that I had to do some watering of pots, which prompted me to attend to my collection of small plants sitting around waiting to be found a permanent home.  There are usually quite a few of these, although I rehomed several of the duplicates (divisions and cuttings, mostly, taken as insurance against losing valuable plants in the garden) by taking them to the village plant sale.  (And for once I didn’t bring too many new plants back.)  There are three problems with having ‘waifs and strays’ in little pots: they need watering more frequently than larger pots, they tend to collect weeds in their compost that can outcompete them, and – because they are usually sited on the paved area around the back door – as they grow they can get their roots down through the pot and into the cracks between the flagstones.  They then become immoveable without fatal damage to their roots, a problem that beset my potted wallflower, which was intended to accompany tulips in one of the big pots but had to be left where it was.  It flowered profusely, and I’ve taken cuttings in the hope of growing it more appropriately next year!

The wallflower

Since then I’ve spent some time re-potting the plants I want to keep, and grouping some in slightly larger pots, which makes it easier to keep them watered.  A fern which has been sitting in the same pot (and compost) for a good few years was split in two: one half potted up with a Carex ‘Evergold’ (I think – an unlabelled plant sale purchase) and some miniature Dianthus ‘Siberian Blues’ (more pink than blue, to be honest, but pretty), and the other half with Phormium ‘Tricolor’ and a trailing purple-leaved sedum.  Neither pot is particularly colourful at the moment, but they will fill out in due course – and they, and the pots they are now in, can be left undisturbed through the winter.  A rather neglected silver thyme got a new pot and a sunnier position on the patio, which it seems to be appreciating.  And the sweet peas were planted in a large pot against the house wall where they can climb to their hearts’ content.  (They are the autumn-sown sweet peas; the spring ones never germinated.  Why not?)

Fern, dianthus and carex, newly repotted

Sweet peas 'Fire and Ice', 'White Leamington' and 'Matucana'

Of last year’s plant sale purchases, most have been planted out in the new bed, as described in a previous post.  One, Coreopsis ‘Golden Joy’, succumbed after planting; I wasn’t too unhappy about that, as it was a brassy yellow and frilly to boot, whereas on reflection I would have preferred something more delicate.  I duly replaced it with some anthemis (I think it might be ‘Sauce Hollandaise’ – it was another unlabelled plant sale purchase from some years ago), which is much more elegant.  Likewise I was rather relieved that Salvia ‘Hot Lips’ didn’t survive the winter; it was an impulse buy, but on reflection not really something I felt I could live with as it’s a rather unforgiving shade of pink.

The window box has been replanted for the summer.  The miniature daffodils haven’t yet died back fully, so the whole planting was lifted out and squeezed into a plastic trough (roughly the same size) to sit it out until it’s safe to dig out and dry off the bulbs.  The new planting is a bit of a mixture of my ‘waifs and strays’: a bronze carex, a fuchsia, a variegated ivy, a small salvia, and a few Cosmos ‘Xanthos’ and Lobelia ‘Cambridge Blue’, the last three grown from seed.  This planting 'needs to mature', as they say, but shouldn't look too bad in due course.

The dahlias are still sitting around in their small pots waiting to be found homes for the summer.  This is likely to be in more (large) pots rather than in the oregano bed, which hasn’t yet been fully cleared.  The big pots are mostly vacant and waiting to be reused; the tulips that were in there over spring have mostly been dug out and discarded.  I owe an apology to the potful of orange tulips which I had assumed had been sent in error as ‘World Friendship’; on examining the plant label I see that they were actually ‘Ballerina’, so exactly as they were meant to be (except for a single pink interloper that came up among them!).  I have a feeling that ‘Ballerina’ might be reasonably perennial, so have kept those to die back naturally with a view to replanting them somewhere.  I’ve also kept the ‘Exotic Emperor’ and ‘Orange Emperor’ tulips undisturbed in the hope that they will reflower next year.  Rather than leave the pot containing the former as bare compost, I sowed the contents of various old packets of flower seed in that pot, thinking that most of them wouldn’t germinate, but in fact there’s a good number of seedlings coming up, including some nasturtiums that I was certain were too old to do anything.  The results might be colourful to say the least, but should be fun! 

Tulip 'Ballerina' - with pink interloper!