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?