Weeding
Posted: Sun 17 August, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Green Garden 4 Comments »The weather over the last few weekends has been bloody horrible (well, unless you’re a duck) which has meant that we couldn’t get out into the garden to do any weeding etc. As a result, at least half the veg patch was looking more like we were cultivating nettles rather than vegetables.
Yesterday was – at last – a dry day, which meant I was out in the garden for about three hours all told, just clearing out one small section of the patch, clearing the earth around the courgettes and pumpkins. Just that one patch has filled up the brown ‘garden waste’ bin – and in a fit of piss-poor timing, that won’t be collected until next Wednesday (the 27th) which is a bit of a pain in the tits. There’s still a lot to do out there – not least bringing in all the potatoes and onions, which all need to be sorted before long – but at least having got one part cleared, it’s beginning to feel more manageable again.
Of course, today started with four hours of heavy rain again, which kind of nulls out the entire weeding and gardening thing for the moment. But at least I’ve made a start on it. And if we get any dry evenings this week, I think I know where I’m going to be…
I am concerned about the amount you are putting in your brown bin! Surely all you cleared can’t have been perennial weeds (nettles, docks, mares’ tails, ground elder, bindweed etc)?
Couldn’t most of it go on the compost heap instead (remove roots from nasty perennials first and don’t add bindweed at all)?
Or be placed in a large receptacle and have rainwater poured on it before being covered with a lid with small holes (to allow for aeration) and left to ‘stew’ for a few weeks/months before being drained off – the decomposed debris organic matter can then safely go on the compost, while the liquid can be diluted and used as lovely orgnaic plant feed.
We only put about a large carrier bag full of stuff into the bin in a year! (all only roots of perennials). The rest fuels the continued garden cycle.
If you dry perennial weeds in the sun (OK, not this year!) they are very burnable (greenly) as firestarter in wood burners.
And have you tried nettle soup (or, if you have *that* many, selling them to Yarg for cheese wrappings!?) 😉
Yes, BW, it was all unpleasant perennial weeds like nettles and something bindweed-esque. I’m not 100% certain of what it was/is (there’s still a whole load of it in the other parts of the veg patch) but it’s a definite something I don’t want returning.
We put as much stuff as possible into compost rather than brown bin, but as you say, perennial weeds go in the brown bin.
Long-term, yes, the goal is that we don’t put much in the brown bin. But at the moment while we’re still just starting off (this is second season on the veg patch now, but it’s still a bit of a wilderness, and will be this year and next, I suspect) I figure it’s easier to let Serco/Council handle the weeds in compost (and, one assumes, sterilising them before putting them in compost), rather than us doing it.
when me and my dad had an alottment we had this mettal bin to burn all our garden rubbish even bits of wood, we havnt got the alottment no more as it was kind of taking over our lives ah ah, so we have organized the back garden a bit and growing some veg but the weather hasnt helped things along much