(gentle music) (bird song)
- A difficult weed in gardening is bindweed, Convolvulus.
There are two different kinds,
one is hedge bindweed that grows up tall
and has white flowers,
the other is field bindweed or lesser bindweed
that grows more on the ground and has little white flowers
and smaller leaves.
In a way, it doesn't really matter which one you've got,
they're both quite similar.
They're perennial weeds,
which means that their roots live in the ground
for a long time and stay dormant over winter.
So you might arrive in a garden in the spring
and think everything's looking nice and clean,
no weeds, and then suddenly,
in late spring, early summer, say May,
it warms up and whoosh!
You get a, kind of,
upgrowth of these amazing shoots
which is the top growth
reflecting more or less vigor in the root.
The method I find works well
to initially tame it a bit,
and then eventually even get rid of it,
if you really keep up with the removal,
is initially mulching.
Here we mulched with compost,
on top of a lot of weeds.
Exactly one year ago,
what you're looking at here,
where these squash are growing in this bed,
was like this.
I exaggerate not.
A year ago it was like that.
And that's partly why we left this un-mowed,
so that you can see.
There were nettles,
there were and still is bindweed,
there were grasses,
they've all gone now, through mulching,
thistles too, I mean look at these thistles.
And now, just while we're on thistles,
(laughing)
here's a thistle remaining.
And one thing I can do, the compost really helps,
I can get that in there, under the prickly bit,
and pull the top growth from that perennial weed
which is in there.
So doing that on a regular basis,
I mean not that often,
but say every week.
It's not onerous thing.
That really weakens the parent root which is still in there,
until suddenly there's no more energy left
in that parent root.
Poom, you've got delightful no more thistles.
And it's the same with bindweed,
except that it takes a lot longer.
(trowel scraping) And I'm gonna show you
removing the weed.
In fact just before that,
I've noticed there's a couple of little fat hen weeds
which are annuals,
they just pull out so that's not a problem.
But the bindweed,
I'm putting the trowel in fairly deep in the compost
and levering and we'll see what comes out.
You just pull gently at this point
and it gives an indication of what's going on down there.
What you almost certainly never get,
none of that is parent root,
which is darker in color and more woody in texture.
This is new growth which has come up from that parent root,
just in the last month maybe,
and it looks like we might have
already removed a bit of a shoot there,
and we removed a bit of a shoot there.
And so this, sort of subsidiary to the parent root,
has produced new growth there.
And that's the bit,
if you keep removing this
you're gradually tiring out the parent root.
However, in this case,
because the bindweed is so vigorous,
there's quite a bit of it needs doing.
There's some more,
and so on.
So there's probably in this bed
about, well a good five minutes,
maybe a bit more, of doing this
about every week through most of the summer.
And it can feel like you're never gonna get to the end of it
in that first summer.
The growth is weaker as time goes on.
Over there I had a lot of bindweed in year one,
kept at it every week,
in year two still quite a bit,
and it was beginning to feel like
hang on a minute,
but year three suddenly, by about June,
it stopped growing,
and there's almost none there now.
So, you know, it can be done.
And I'll just show you the difference,
you can see here that the amount of bindweed
and the vigor of the roots,
by the way it's growing up all the other weeds,
but if we find a root here, for example,
so this is the same bindweed but it's growing in soil
which has not been mulched with any compost.
And it just shows the difference
and the value of the compost,
because for one thing,
I'm really struggling to get the trowel into the ground,
and then puchunk, it's just broken off
without being able to even get any root out,
because this ground is really hard and dense.
It's a silt soil, it's a good soil,
but without any mulch on top,
it's very difficult to do any weeding.
So that's where the compost really comes in.
It's party about smothering,
we put some cardboard down as well,
before the compost,
that's an initial smother of the weeds.
And then the perennial weeds that go through,
you just need to keep on top of them.
But with the compost mulch it is a lot easier
and you will get there in the end.
So I'm looking to offer you encouragement
in coping with some of these more difficult weeds.
(gentle music)
(trowel digging)