Get to the root cause of weeds

If tough weeds start to take over your garden it's time to arm yourself with the right tools, writes FIONNUALA FALLON

IN A DETERMINED attempt to lick a much-neglected flower border back into some sort of shape, I’ve spent much of the past few weeks weeding, weeding, weeding . . . and then, when I’ve had a moment or two to spare, weeding some more.

I have, in fact, weeded so very much, so very often and so very diligently that my nights are now filled with dreams about weeding – something that seems curiously unfair given the generally monotonous nature of the task.

But despite what I’d modestly like to think of as a quite heroic effort on my part, work on the neglected border has progressed at what can only be described as a snail’s pace. My excuse is the nature of the weeds infesting it, which are not the kind of easy-peasy, shallow-rooted annuals that a hoe will cleanly slice through, or which will obligingly lift out of the ground given even a half-hearted tug.

While I’d go so far as to say that I actually quite like those kinds of weeds, I’m instead doing bad-tempered battle with a host of impressively persistent, perennial heavyweights: dense carpets of creeping buttercup, intricately knotted mats of ground elder, wiry tangles of rhizomatous scutch grass and dandelions with tap roots the size of carrots.

And that’s not to mention the many other unwelcome plants that have also colonised the border, such as the yellow-flowered mounds of wild celandines with their brittle tuberous root systems that resemble potatoes of doll’s-house proportions, and which always fall apart the moment I try to dig them out, or the pungent-smelling hedge woundwort, whose stoloniferous root system seems capable of colonising large tracts of ground in the twinkling of an eye.

As for the question of how this flower-bed ever got into this sorry state, I’ve no good answer. Suffice to say that I’ve been painfully and forcibly reminded of the unbendable, unbreakable, and inviolable rule of weeding that is “little and often” rather than “only when you’ve time and have had adequate sleep”.

But now I mean business. And when it comes to doing doughty battle with the heavies of the “weedy” world, I discovered long ago that it pays to know your foes. Hence I’ve found that while the octopus-like roots of creeping buttercup are usually almost impossible to prise out of damp, clay soil (particularly when they’re growing right next to a choice perennial), a small hand-tool that’s shaped like a snake’s forked tongue, known as a daisy grubber, does the job perfectly.

The same tool is also excellent for levering out the long tap-roots of dandelions and docks, as is the Plackenstecher or Dock Digger – a long-handled tool with two sharp, curving tines, from Fruithill Farm ( fruithillfarm.com).

The brittle, spaghetti -like rhizomes of the horribly invasive ground elder are a very different matter, as are the iron-hard, ivory-white rhizomes of scutch or couch grass.

My plan – a slightly ambitious one, given how stubbornly persistent these plants are – is to carefully excavate every last inch of their underground stems before they have a chance to stealthily regenerate. But small hand tools are next to useless where infestations of these weeds are well established, while a spade isn’t a great idea either, making it all too easy to slice through the rhizomes and accidentally leave them behind, hidden deep in the soil.

Instead I’ve been using a long-handled garden fork to tease large clumps of the plants out of the ground, while ruthlessly removing and discarding any nearby perennials or shrubs whose roots systems I think are inextricably infested. As for the celandines, I’m resigned to a prolonged battle, with many skirmishes along the way.

All in all, it’s something of a scorched earth policy – the result (for the moment) being a flower border that contains few plants and a lot of bare soil. But experience has taught me that it will pay dividends long term, as long as I persist in digging out stubborn survivors while quickly hoeing young weed seedlings back into the soil.

In the meantime, whenever it all gets a little hard-going, I’ll be seeking solace in the relatively well-tended vegetable patch. Here, my recently-acquired “swoe” – a lightweight and hugely useful, double-bladed hoe made by Fiskars that gets into the tightest of corners, works wonders within a few minutes.

As for those recently evicted perennial weeds, I’m keeping them well away from the compost heap where their root systems might stand a small chance of survival. They’re going straight into sealed, black bin bags (punctured for drainage), where they’ll eventually be transformed into wonderfully crumbly, garden compost. Because here is the truly marvellous thing about almost all weeds, even the most thuggish of them – their leaves, stems and roots are often rich in an astonishing array of plant nutrients and minerals, which these sturdy, stubborn plants are adept at extracting from even the poorest of soils.

Scutch grass, for example, is rich in potassium and silica, while dandelion leaves are rich in iron. Nettle leaves are rich in nitrogen, silica and iron as well as other mineral salts while horsetail contains lots of cobalt, calcium, silica, and even gold. Turned into compost and used as a soil-enriching mulch, they will be treasure of a different kind.

Diary date

The Irish Specialist Nursery Association (ISNA) will be holding a plant fair on March 24th (from 10am) in the Red Stables, St Anne's Park, Dublin 3. For more details log on to isna.ie

This week in the garden

Plant potatoes, onion sets and shallots

Sow vegetable seeds into modules/seed trays or outdoors

Pot up/plant out lily bulbs for a colourful summer display

If the ground isn’t waterlogged, lawn seed can be sown onto well-prepared soil