Yew Dell Botanical Gardens $5M castle improvement project
Kentucky’s tiniest castle gets a $5 million royal facelift at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens. Take a peek.
If you’re not weeding, you’re not gardening. There. I said it.
I guess that should really read, “if you’re not weeding, you’re not gardening right.”
If you’re gardening in a way that makes a good home for your plants, there should be little surprise that a few uninvited guests will show up on their own. It’s sort of like shoveling out a parking spot on the side of the road after a winter storm. Sure as you take a quick trip to the grocery store for your loaves and fishes, there will be someone else’s car sitting in your nicely cleared-out spot when you return.
Spring weeding is all about making sure your invited garden guests have enough room to establish and thrive. The soil is moist. You’ve just dropped some nicely processed compost. The heat of the summer hasn’t yet appeared. Perfect conditions for all those uninvited volunteers.
But summer weeding is different.
Summer weeds are insidious. They’re the sneaky little varmints that catch you when you’re not looking. They stealthily cover the ground under the canopy of your tomato plants, where you can’t see them until they’re the size of Everglades boa constrictors. I pulled in my driveway a few days ago to see a porcelain vine (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) sticking it’s annoying little head out of the top of my crepe myrtle. That’s about 10-feet of clandestine weed growth since the last time I pulled it down.
But to stay ahead of, or even stay even with those late summer weeds, you have to understand the three basic strategies they employ.
How to control annual weeds in the garden
My agricultural Achilles heel the last few years has been mulberry weed (Fatoua villosa), so named not because it produces luscious purple fruit but because it is in the mulberry family.
Most annual plants, mulberry weed included, employ a numbers strategy. Rather than producing just a few large offspring (like, say, a coconut palm or a blue whale) annual plants throw a blue zillion seeds at you. The general strategy is that annual plants (at least those we consider to be weeds) figure they can make more seedlings than you can pull in a typical garden season. And at a ratio of something like one hundred bazillion seeds per annual plant, all that plant population needs is for you to miss one or two seedlings. Exactly why my (annual) zinnias only make about a half dozen seeds per flower is just a meany joke at the expense of gardeners the world over.
The key to reducing next year’s population of annual weeds is to keep them from flowering and fruiting this year. And remembering the numbers lesson above, you can’t miss a single one. While it’s best to get all the roots when you root, those roots aren’t key to controlling annual weeds. That mulberry weed can keep putting out top growth but if you keep slicing it off with your hoe it won’t ever produce seeds. The roots will die when winter comes around.
How to control herbaceous perennial weeds in the garden
Plants that overwinter below ground as any number of fleshy root-type plants, employ a different strategy. Dandelions (Taraxicum officinale) and poke weed (Phytolacca americana) can reproduce by seed. We’ve all seen that. But most perennial weeds employ a strategy of putting a maximum amount of late summer/fall energy down into that belowground root system. The bigger the overwintering root system, the faster it gives you a gigantic headache the next spring.
Controlling herbaceous perennial weeds takes a varied approach. If you are a puller, best strap on the hi-grip gloves and practice your Tai chi. Because if you pull out 90% of the root system but leave behind 10%, it will be right back up in your face before you can say … whatever you say when a stubborn weed foils you, again.
The other strategy is to use the perennial weed’s modus operandi against it. If you are up for using systemic herbicides, late summer and early fall are your friends. Most systemic herbicides are designed to hitch a ride on the perennial plant’s system of sending all its resources below ground for the winter. Once there, the herbicide can kill the roots. Targeted application (with a foam brush, for instance) can accomplish the work with very little herbicide and with little to no off-target impact. Top burn herbicides (like horticultural vinegar) only kill the top and are not translocated to the roots so don’t do as good a job of killing the whole plant.
Even more insidious is the ability of some perennial weeds to reproduce from little vegetative bits that break off, roll down the hill, and make new problems. The seemingly unconquerable fig butterwort (Ficaria verna) invades lowland valleys where seasonal floods carry little broken off bits downstream to sprout anywhere and everywhere.
How to fight woody weeds
Whether you are battling the dreaded Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), porcelain vine (Ampelopsis bervipedunculata), or tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), you are unfortunately up for a dual battle. Many of these woody invaders employ both the numbers game of annual weeds and the below ground storage strategy of herbaceous perennials.
Certainly, keeping these from flowering and fruiting is important. Birds love the honeysuckle and porcelain vine fruits and have the infuriating tendency to pass them through their system undamaged, and then deposit them in your garden, in tremendous numbers, encased in a nice little fertilizer packet.
But as the days shorten and those woody plants start to do what their herbaceous perennial brethren do, mobilize resources and send them south, gardeners can use that system to their advantage. Cut stems immediately treated with one of several herbicides can kill even a large woody plant’s root system. Indeed, sometimes following this treatment, the plant will send out a slimy ooze from the cut stump — all to the glee of the observing gardener.
You might call that weeding right!
Paul Cappiello is the executive director at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, 6220 Old Lagrange Road, yewdellgardens.org.
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