Disaster in the Greenhouse

Well I had such a lovely morning planned out. One of my favourite jobs of the year, planting the tomatoes in the greenhouse, when disaster struck!

The garden apprentice (otherwise known as husband) was with me, as he has to help me with the heavy bags of compost to replenish last years. He said, ‘what’s that weed?”

I started to pull it, then gently started to uncover it’s roots. I said, “it looks like a potato”. More uncovering in sued.

The gardening apprentice said, that’s no potato! We dug deeper and finally realised with dread, that it was Ground Elder!!! Or it’s rather unpronounceable Latin name Aegopodium Podagraio.

I think every garden has it’s nasties, our last garden had bindweed. The weeds that fall into the ‘real nasties’ category are perennial weeds that have ridiculously deep roots and when you break a bit of said root, it regrows from each piece.

When we first moved here nearly ten years ago (where does time go to!), there was ground elder everywhere. In places where we dug it out, the roots were so congested that there was no soil between them!

We despaired at first, but gradually as we (the royal we known as the garden apprentice) dug and seived all the soil where borders were going, we felt we pretty much conquered it.

The main reason for seiving all of the soil was to get rid of all the stones and bolders in our ‘quarry garden’, as we our geologically on top of an ice age sand and gravel deposit. Getting rid of the weeds was an added benefit.

If you’re not trying to garden organically, you can blast it with some strong pesticides, but the problems are:

1/ These weeds usually turn up in the middle of your prized plants that you don’t want to risk killing.

2/ If they’re near to where you grow food, the last thing you want to use are chemicals.

3/ You could and probably would harm the wildlife.

So for the organic remedies. First job, dig as much out as possible. Luckily in the greenhouse, the planting area has nothing permanently growing in it, so all the compost down to around 18” came out and was transported to our local recycling centre.

At the centre they have the facilities to kill perennial weeds by making sure that the composting material reaches at least 60 degrees for 48 hours.

Once down to this level, there were still a couple of roots heading yet further south. It was obvious that the ground elder had been there right from when we built the greenhouse in 2016.

This is a little worrying wondering where else in the garden its merrily spreading waiting to pop up and say, “surprise, I’m still here”.

Really with pernicious weeds that this you probably just have to learn to live with them. Pull them up whenever you see them and ideally dig as much root as as if feasible, weekening the plant.

Back in the greenhouse, we covered the area with some sand and then really thick black plastic.

The idea is, to deprive the ground elder of light and reduce its water.

We then started putting the compost back.

And so, the whole day had been taken up sorting out a problem we didn’t even know we had, and there was no time left for the lovely job of planting.

A week later however the joyful day came. The little tomato plants, a Gherkin and something new for this year, a Cucamelon, are happily planted in their new summer residence and growing away nicely.

I had one tomato seed germinate in a tray of Cosmos, it seemed so vigorous that I’ve decided to plant it and wait for the surprise of finding out what variety it is.