Weed of the week

The current Weed of the Week is the dandelion.

At this time of year there’s always too much to do in the garden, and I tend to take a ‘last-minute’ approach to garden jobs.  I can’t remove all the weeds (ok, ‘plants in the wrong place’), so I focus on what’s in flower (and about to set seed) and home in on that, or at least take off the flower-heads; if I can’t dig the plant out at least I can stop it seeding around. 

Just now I’m doing a daily dandelion patrol around the garden, often at least twice a day.  The sight of a dot of yellow in the lawn sends me running for the daisy grubber (my preferred dandelion-removing tool) to do my best to dig the offending plant out.  Sometimes the base of the root stays in the soil, but at least it won’t re-flower until the autumn, when I’ll have more time to attend to it.

Verge across the lane

As weeds go, dandelions are fairly desirable plants (they’re good for insects, for example).  However there are lots and lots of dandelions in the fields and hedgerows around here for the insects to enjoy – the grass verge across the lane is full of them – and I don’t feel too bad about trying to eradicate them from my garden.  I’ve had some success over the years in reducing the number of them in the lawn, but they often appear around the edges, at the base of walls, along path edges and under the hedges; my pet peeve is those that hide among other yellow flowers, especially the doronicums, which have very similar-looking flowers that disguise the dandelions. 

Dandelion hiding beside the doronicums!

The first weed of the year is usually the hairy bittercress, a tiny plant that produces huge quantities of seed, often appearing in the compost of pots and the gravel of the drive; I pulled out some big rosettes of it back in late winter, and fortunately they're very shallow-rooted and easy to remove, but you never spot all of them.  I’ve also found some groundsel, a weed that I almost entirely eradicated in the garden some years ago but which reappeared last year and is still coming back this spring.  There’s always quite a few willowherb seedlings, especially in the veg patch for some reason, and I take them out whenever I see them; I often think I’ve got them all out, and then at the end of the growing season I find a few plants seeding merrily away in some corner or other.

Allium triquetrum

Some ‘weeds’ are of my own making.  The three-cornered leek, Allium triquetrum, that I found early on in the garden and, since the flowers are attractive and good for cutting, spread them around, have taken over in several places and keep cropping up ever more widely.  I’ve tried dead-heading them and then attacking them with the shears (the leaves make good compost!) as there are really too many to dig out en masse.  There just isn’t the time to deal with them.  And, talking of alliums, my chives are about to flower; I need to get the heads off those so that they don’t spread too widely.

I’ve found some rather nice-looking leaves in one of the beds – geranium?  Maybe it’s a weed too …..

Geranium?

Too much of a good thing

You can’t have too much of a good thing, the saying goes, but in the garden I think you definitely can.

Mind you, the dismal weather recently relented for a couple of days, with some warm sunshine on Wednesday, which was a really Good Thing, and we could do with more of it; but now we’re back to more normal temperatures, with mostly showery and breezy days in the forecast.  It has been quite dry for a week or so, and plants in pots are suffering, so some rain would actually be quite welcome!

At this time of year I’m always behind with the garden jobs, but having been away for much of March (and part of February before that) I have a lot of jobs to tackle.  One that should have been done in March and is still only partly done, is pruning the buddleja.  It’s a big old bush, woody and bare in the middle, with a fringe of new shoots round the edges, and I tend to allow as many of these new shoots to grow as possible; the result is that they tend to become rather congested, and there are now many more branches to prune than previously.  Pruning them is only part of the job; dealing with the prunings, many of them very long, is a time-consuming task.  It would be easier if I had a shredder and were prepared to use it on them, but I like to make use of at least some of them – the long poles for pea and bean wigwams, the sticky-out tops as supports for small plants and to guard seedbeds against intruding birds, and the old seedheads and new leaves for the compost heap.  Trimming all those prunings to suitable sizes takes time, and while the many growing shoots are a ‘Good Thing’, especially for the butterflies, the quantity of them is becoming a bit of a nuisance.  This year I’m being more prepared to rub some out, which will reduce flowering but will, I hope, also reduce the job next spring.

Half-pruned!

The bare middle

Some of the prunings have already been used as stakes for peony 'Sarah Bernhardt', and more have been earmarked to do the same job for the giant achillea.

Another ‘Good Thing’ that might be too much is the pink felicia that I’ve used to top some of the tulip pots and have potted up for growing on elsewhere.  As I rather suspected at the time and mentioned in a previous post last year, it’s pretty bomb-proof; not only has it now sailed through the winter unharmed, but the pots of it outside the greenhouse have been regularly disturbed and overturned by an inquisitive pheasant that seems determined to peck at them.  I’ve given up bothering; the felicia seems to grow undeterred even when upended.

Overturned felicia pots

Then there’s the symphyandra acquired from last year’s plant sale and planted rather haphazardly in very stony soil.  It doesn’t seem to mind, in fact it is already spreading rather worryingly.  It’s not invasive yet, but I can see that it might become so.  Note to self: keep an eye on it and cut it down to size if necessary!

Symphyandra among the stones

Some of my ‘too much of a Good Things’ are self-inflicted.  I can’t bring myself to trust that seeds will germinate, and tend to sow too many.  As a result I now have 18 lettuce seedlings.  How much lettuce will we be able to eat?!  I’ll try to give some away.

Lots of lettuce!

But sometimes plants increasing by themselves can be a genuinely Good Thing.  Some old tulip bulbs bedded out at the far end of the veg patch, for want of anywhere better to put them, have increased rather nicely, despite being overrun by the lily-of-the-valley.  I use them for cutting and am grateful for the colours that they bring to the house.

Veg patch tulips - definitely a Good Thing

BST

The clocks have gone forward, and we’re now in British Summer Time (BST).  Not that you would know it from the weather.  Magnolias and cherry trees in other gardens are in splendid flower, and the birds are nesting, but the weather is still fickle.  We had a good, dry week towards the end of the month – we were away and enjoyed the fine days – but then it turned chilly and showery, with occasional hail, again.  In our absence a pot of fancy Hellebore (Helleborus x glandorfensis 'Red Snow'), brought as a present by a visitor and left outside while I considered what to do with it, dried out a little too much and is looking very sad.  If it recovers, I need to find a suitable spot for it; the modern hybrids, I read, like more sun than the older varieties, and tend to be a little short-lived.  (This one might be very short-lived indeed, though I’ll try to revive it!)

Narcissus 'Thalia'

Tulip 'Exotic Emperor'

Tulip 'Orange Emperor' - and a calendula!

The little daffodils in the two big tubs are now mostly over, with just a few of the later varieties still coming through; most of the daffs in the ground are still going strong, and the clump of Narcissus ‘Thalia’ by the patio is flowering strongly.  The first tulips are in bloom – white ‘Exotic Emperor’ (syn. ‘White Valley’) and its orange cousin ‘Orange Emperor’; these are now a few years old, left in their pots with a top-dressing of fresh compost each year, and seem to be doing really well and bulking up.  Good value bulbs.  I’m not sure whether to top-dress them this year; last year I sowed annuals in the pots to make use of them during the summer, and a lone calendula is flowering gamely alongside ‘Orange Emperor’, but the second generation of seeds might not germinate if covered with too much compost.   I might try scooping out the top couple of centimetres of compost, with any self-sown seeds, and put that somewhere in the garden, to give me a wildflower-look effect. 

Camellia williamsii 'Donation'

The cowslips are shyly poking through the grass in the lawn, and there are primulas (self-set) under the apple cordons.  The older camellia, C. williamsii ‘Donation’, is flowering superbly, and even the newer one, C. ‘Ruby Wedding’, which has never flowered before, has a couple of buds just breaking.  This is interesting; the usual advice about non-flowering camellias is to water them well in June and July when the buds are being formed, but last year those months were hot and dry and I’m sure the camellias didn’t get their necessary soak.  I bought ‘Ruby Wedding’ a number of years ago, looking for a red-flowered one (so as not to clash with the daffodils), but at the garden centre I noticed that several different varieties had the same photo on their label; unsure whether any of them were red-flowered, I plumped for ‘Ruby Wedding’, reckoning that there was a good chance it would be red – and finally, after several years, it turns out that indeed it is.

C. 'Ruby Wedding' - and yes, it is red!

I had planned to split the Bergenia ‘Bressingham White’ as it’s starting to look in need of division, but in fact it has flowered better than it ever has.  I used to worry that the white was too white alongside the pale cream Narcissus ‘Jenny’, but it doesn’t look too bad.  I’ll split it if I can find the time, but otherwise shall leave well alone.  In my last garden I had B. ‘Silberlicht’, but while the flowers were white when in full bloom the buds and the fading flowers were pinkish, which wasn’t what I wanted; ‘Bressingham White’ is much whiter.

Bergenia 'Bressingham White' - and Narcissus 'Jenny'

On the veg front, some lettuce seeds sown before we went away in the middle of the month are sprouting nicely, and the first of the broad bean ‘Imperial Green Longpod’ are starting to push through their compost.  The netting over the two purple sprouting broccoli plants has successfully kept the pigeons at bay, and the plants are producing a good crop of greens. 

The birds don’t seem to be much in evidence since our return from abroad – a few sparrows, dunnocks and blue tits, the two robins and a couple of blackbirds, and of course the woodpigeons and pheasants.  But they seem to be shunning the fatball container.  I’ve seen the sparrowhawk a few times – I wonder if she has been attacking the little birds?  I suppose she’s nesting too, and looking to feed herself up.  I moved the fatball container to a spot close to the shrubs, to allow birds to hide quickly if needed, and that seems to have worked; a pair of bluetits were feeding there today.  Perhaps the pair spotted a couple of weeks back staking out the nestbox and now apparently setting up home there.

Not sure what this is ....

Despite the chill, it hasn’t been a particularly cold winter, but the catmint (nepeta) seems to have died.  I wonder why?  And I wonder what is this plant nearby – not something I recognise?  I’ll leave it and see what it does; if it’s a nasty thug, I can heave it out before it does too much damage, and otherwise I’ll hope for some nice flowers!