Dealing with weeds

There are three main ways to dealing with weeds.

1. Mulch to stop them growing.
2. Diligently keep pulling them out.
3. Burn them out.

The mulching is really the better choice. Whether you use a weed membrane or a spent mushroom compost, it covers the seeds and stops them germinating. Thats all well and good it you have the spare finances and time to deal with it. But we don't spend a great deal on the allotment. It more for a little bit of veg here and there and a way to escape the house for a short period of time. Something which is well and truly appreciated in these current times.

Pulling them is seriously time consuming and you need to do it regularly. Well we only go to the plot a couple of times a week. It's quite a hike from where we live and a busy schedule doesn't really allow us to spend a lot of time during the weekdays done there.

So I opted for the burning. I have a weed gun which deals quite easily with seeds on the ground.

Last year the plot was seriously neglected due to ill health and the weeds well and truly took over. So now we're kind of fighting back. A lot of our beds have been infested, and although we tried to keep on top of it there was just too much. Our crop of New Zealand Spinach either didn't germinate, or failed to compete with the weeds in the soil, so we pulled it a few weeks back. And the bed has been lying dormant ever since. So it's time to kill the seeds and get something else in there.

So what started as this...

Ended up as this...

These are side-shoots from the many rogue tomatoes that we've had poking their heads up throughout the plot. Technically they're weeds too. "A weed is a plant growing in the wrong place." But they're useful weeds.

The trough you can see there is actually part of the framework built over the Kale bed and holds up the netting. London pigeons are the worst and they have decimated our attempts to grow Kale in the past. This year we're keeping them at bay and having a massive crop of Kale as a result... when the butterfly caterpillars aren't munching them that is.

Elsewhere we're gathering in Courgettes in huge numbers (again).

And we pulled the last of the peas. We've had a good crop this year, enough for several meals. But now the plants are dying so it's time to clear the bed. I'll let it sit for a while before hitting it with the weed gun and getting something else in there. You can see the old pea bed at the back of this shot.

As this is where I've started digging out some of the potatoes from earlier in the year. It was an unexpected find we thought we wouldn't be able to do anything with them, but I stopped digging when we had enough for a meal. The rest are (hopefully) still in there.

The next major crop we're expecting though will have to be the Apples.

The tree is bending under the weight of them. But sadly a lot of them appear to have been hit with the moth again despite putting up a trap. There is only one thing worse than biting into an apple and discovering a maggot...