Weed Warfare Made Simple

Yes it’s that time again. May seems to be the month when everything green suddenly bursts into life. Unfortunately this also includes the weeds. Small, previously invisible and non-threatening weed seedlings suddenly become massive monsters almost bigger than your prized feature plants.
I ask myself two questions:
(1) How did that weed get so enormous without me noticing it before?
(2) Why don’t my prized feature plants grow as quickly as the weeds?
And the answer is: because that’s Murphy’s Law and one of the marvels of gardening !!!
I have two friends (actually I have more than two, but this story concerns just these friends…). One friend is a keen and extremely experienced gardener. The other doesn’t have a garden, but appreciates the importance of neat flowerbeds.
My first friend takes me for walks around their garden accompanied with dramatic throwing up of the hands in horror saying “Oh look at all these weeds !!! I’m never going to get it under control !!!” but doesn’t actually do anything about it, so eventually has to pay people to come in and do a massive blitz over a period of several days. This costs dear financially and aesthetically as the garden maintenance people aren’t in the business of treading carefully – they are of the “quick chop and tidy” school of thought.
My second friend came to stay with me last weekend. We were walking round the garden and she was asking what was what. We came to my rather weedy raised beds of onions. “Are these onions?” she asked “Yes,” I replied. “So these other plants in here are weeds, then?” “Yes,” I admitted – “no one is immune to the blighters…” and before I knew it, we were weeding and chatting and within 10 minutes, I had three beautifully weed-free beds. It didn’t seem like work because we were chatting the whole time. So if you have weeds threatening to take over, perhaps you could get together with some friends and plan a few hours to share the work in each other’s gardens. It is a real case of “many hands make light work” and the promise of a cup of tea and a good gossip is hard for most people to resist…