Neither rain nor sun nor gloomy overcast skies...
Will deter this gardener from clearing Ground Elder from her flower bed!
I haven’t written in a while. We’ve been busy with all kinds of things. Lots of visitors (love that), clearing out sheds, sorting out the greenhouse and potting up those tomatoes and staging and watering them so that they won’t die leaving us with no homegrown tomatoes (“Just two things money can’t buy, that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.”)1
So I’m taking a 15 minute break from the biggest job so far, made a little easier with the few dry days we’ve just had (notice I said DRY, not SUNNY.) Today is a really sunny day and in the high 60s although it feels much warmer in the sun, making short breaks and glasses of water mandatory if I plan to live to see the end of the day.
What’s the big job you might ask?
Well, last summer I spent the entire time in recovery from one procedure or another (I may have mentioned this before.) Recovery meant no lifting, pulling or bending down or digging. I got a lot of knitting done but very little gardening. It didn’t look too bad in early spring but then we had a week of dry warmish weather and the ground elder took over,2 a weed so pernicious and prolific that it literally buried the plants in another border; I had four hydrangea “Runaway Bride” disappear altogether, smothered by the stuff. That whole area has been turned, covered in cardboard and bark mulched about 3-4”. We’ll put another 4” on in the fall. This was the advice from the head gardener at Mount Congreve where they are doing this very thing to rid the walled garden of ground elder, creeping buttercup and bindweed—that plus nettles in any area where I might be weeding or just passing are my FOUR NASTIES.
Back to the main task. This nasty weed has completely carpeted to the height of 24” my flower border just outside my kitchen window. That flower bed has had more money poured into it than all of the rest of the beds combined. Dahlias, alstroemerias, day lilies, black cohosh (beautiful spires of small white flowers!), cosmos, passion flower (barely hanging on at this point) and phlox—all being strangled or obliterated.
The primroses, lady’s mantle and the volunteer Calla lily manage to survive but the stuff gets into the roots of these so they need to be dug up, cleaned up and replanted. I have managed to clean it out of the Heuchera… I left the bits of monbretia for now.
At some point this morning I decided that I’m just going to CLEAR everything out and pot up what I want to keep, with the exception of those things that are well established and have been gallantly resisting the incursion of the weed. I’ll rake through for all the roots because even a tiny bit of root will be enough to start the whole thing up again. I’ll put in some fresh compost and head to the garden center to spend the gift card my daughter sent me (she knows me so well!) I’m aiming for getting it done this weekend… or at least by Monday. It will start getting rainy again—it’s Ireland after all. But it’s still a humongous task. My 15 minutes are definitely up… and I need to get cracking. I’ll send another letter out when it’s done with maybe some video of it all done!
First heard this being sung by Greg Brown on A Prairie Home Companion. With a musician husband who was mostly doing gigs on Saturday nights, That radio show saved my sanity. Music, humor, great artists, and a folksy story from Garrison Keilor. During the dark days of winter here, I try to stream some of the old programs and it never fails to center me and lift my spirits.
Often seen as a troublesome weed, ground elder spreads quickly to form a mass of shallow roots and a carpet of leaves. https://www.rhs.org.uk/weeds/ground-elder