Weeds!

Weeds!!! wadda you know? You turn around and there are weeds. Weeds everywhere. A little bit of cool weather and enough rain to get the soil surface wet and up they come. Have you found that weeds are excellent at hiding? One day not so long ago I realised that I was staring into the face of a Sow Thistle. Now I know I’m not that tall but a Sow Thistle as tall as me has to have been growing and hiding, hiding and growing for some time. Weeds also pop up behind my back. I weed a patch of soil, think its done, turn round and……….how could I have missed that one?
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Some of my clients like me to spray their weeds with roundup but I am not very partial to its use so I use other methods of weed control in my own garden. Whether you have a little or a lot of garden it is well worth employing one or more of these methods so like me you can enjoy more time savouring your garden and less time weeding.

1. Build a fence between you and your neighbours and/or you and your own paddocks. It doesn’t need to be a high fence just high enough to stop grass seeds blowing across but low enough to have a chat to the neighbour over the top…..mine is made of old roofing iron and was originally put up to stop my dogs from barking at the neighbours dog. That worked well but I realised that it also served the purpose of blocking the neighbours unmown grass from seeding through to my patch.
2. Plant a plant barrier. I have put in a buffer zone of Poa labillardiera and Dianella revoluta between my cultivated garden and my wilder paddock. It visually blurs the boundary between the garden and the paddock really well and stops a whole lot of paddock seeds blowing in to the garden. 
3. Make edges between grassed areas and garden beds. These could be metal, wood, plastic strip, concrete or trench edging. And always always mow the lawn before it goes to seed so that seeds don’t get a chance to blow where they are not wanted or be spread by the whipper snipper or lawn mower.
4. Newspaper and mulch. I’ve mentioned this before when talking about conservation of soil moisture but the other really good use for this is to suppress weeds and bury previous year’s weed seeds. No it doesn’t last forever but it will give you several years of largely weed free bliss (just remember you cant cover up couch this way and expect it to die, it wont, it will just sneak out sideways. Couch really needs to be dug out or sprayed) 
5. Plant ground covers and/or plant densely so that weed seeds have to compete for light and water. Ground covers I have found particularly useful for this are Einadia nutans, Correa ‘Dusky Bells’, Correa decumbens (either upright or flat), Carpobrotus glaucescens, Chrysochephalum apiculatum (green or silver leafed), Brachyscome decipiens (any colour), Correa ‘White Lies’ (a new plant which we hope to have ready early summer), Grevillea lanigera ‘Mt Tamboritha’ and Grevillea juniperina yellow. Some shrubs, once grown, also suppress weeds for example Westringia ‘Zena’ and Westringia ‘Smokie’ both do as will anything which is dense to the ground.
6. Water plants deeply with drip irrigation.  Don’t use spray irrigation as this waters the whole surface of the soil and where there is nothing else growing weeds will pop up. 
7. Regularly weed before plants go to seed…….. and I mean never walking past a weed without pulling it out, hhmm well almost never anyway. Might sound tedious but when you have employed all these methods together there are very few weeds anyway.
8. Use a blow torch for weeds in gravel or paving. My husband has a session every now and then to cook the weeds. It also cooks any seeds so lasts really well. Do not do this on fire ban days! 

​I hope that has given you plenty of useful ammo up your sleeves for keeping weeds at bay. Next fortnight, by popular demand,  I hope to blog about plants which enjoy shade with some specifics about which of our plants will grow under Eucalyptus trees.
 
 
 

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