Working weeds

The bane of our gardening existence (along with lice), the boa constrictors and ticks of the plant world, are weeds. Other people have made an easy job of exterminating them with pesticides but we don’t use them because we’re very green, of course, and also we’re very stingy about things we could avoid buying and really, spraying something that kills off everything but the special plants is plain lazy.

Anyway, the war on weeds is a neverending campaign, or so it seemed until recently when we took a second to think about it. We had previously used weeds as a sort of mulch for other weeds and it worked perfectly. We had also used weeds for fertiliser and it worked perfectly. So this year, we just did it all: the mulch, the fertiliser, and even the compost. Because weeds are only a problem if you don’t put them to work.

Weed mulch

Also great for trees. Irina clearly still doesn’t know how to talk on camera. Practice might help.

Weed soup

Weed soup doesn’t really deserve a video. It’s neither much of a looker nor much of a, well, smeller. The fact we’ve poured the remainder into a sour cabbage container with a peeling label because we throw nothing away until we absolutely must just adds a special country flavour to the whole thing, we’re sure.

Anyway, to make the soup we just toss a bunch of weeds (no roots) into a 20-l bucket to fill it halfway, add water to the 20-l mark, cover it and let it sit for a few days. If you forget about it for longer, no problem, it would just get stinkier and probably more nutritious.

Once stinky enough, we take out the weeds, toss them in the compost, and mix the soup with water at a ratio of 1:3. Then we use that to water the plants that we feel are worthy of this special treatment. Lesson we learned the hard way: be careful to wear plastic gloves when handling the stuff. It’s really difficult to wash off the smell.

We are now at a partial ceasefire with the weeds, not least because it’s so hot, the hours when it’s possible to work in the garden without roasting are limited and we normally do something else during those hours. So we’ve mostly left them alone. Until it’s time for the next dose of soup, of course.