Cold Climate Gardening

I normally don’t weed my beds in November, because it is too chilly, wet, windy, and perhaps snowy. However, we have been enjoying a string of unseasonably warm days and I was able to take advantage of it today. Weeding grass out of daylily foliage is usually pretty tricky, because the leaves are so similar. But my daylilies have gone dormant, while the various weedy grasses will continue to grow until the ground freezes solid. If we get a good blanket of snow before that happens, those grasses may grow slowly all winter long. So it’s nice to get the upper hand for once. For a little while.

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Goldenrod is my enemy
There, I’ve said it. I don’t care if goldenrod is a native plant; it is no longer welcome in my gardens. I tried to be understanding, truly, I did, but it just did not want to play nice with the other plants. It did not want to play at all: total garden bed domination was its only goal. And it just about succeeded:

It got so bad, I started thinking of this as the goldenrod bed.

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Every year about this time, the Juneberry bed looks like this:
This photo was taken last July, but gives you the general idea: milkweed, musk mallow, lambs’ quarters, and a weedy form of evening primrose all detract from the daylilies that are supposed to shine here.
Being a detail person, in past years I have attempted to deal with the problem by starting at one end, and taking care of every single weed in one spot before moving on. Like this:

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A small change in routine can make a big change in the gardenI was the oldest of a large family, and I aspired to be a good girl. Not so much in the sense of morally superior; I wanted to do it right, correctly. Even as a child, I was a perfectionist.

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Long-time readers of my blog know that I have never shied away from being honest about the poor upkeep of my garden. Sometimes I find beauty in the weeds, and sometimes they depress me, but I’ve never pretended they didn’t exist. I agree with Colleen that fear of “not doing it right,” or “not being good enough,” can keep someone from starting to garden–it almost stopped me. So I am happy to make my contribution to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

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Canada thistle weaves throughout the peony bedObservant readers may have noticed the prickly-leaved weed sidling up to ‘Rozella’ in my last post. That dastardly villain is Canada thistle, aka Cirsium arvense, and it is one nasty customer. According to the University of California Cooperative Extension,

Once established, Canada thistle spreads rapidly by horizontal roots, up to several meters per year. The extensive horizontal root system assures long-term persistence and spread by vegetative means. A segment of root as small as 1/8 to 3/8 inch (3-6 mm) in length and 1/16 inch (1 mm) in diameter is able to propagate a new plant. . . . Once established, Canada thistle is a fierce competitor for nutrients and water needed by crops or native plants. It produces allelopathic chemicals that assist in displacing competing plant species

Okay. It’s obvious this mess didn’t happen overnight. This peony bed was created in 2002, and my weeding practices have been, at best, inconsistent over the years.

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If you are short on time, energy, and money, but notably the first two, be conservative. You’ll be more pleased with one fair-sized, well-composed, well-maintained bed than with a half-dozen large beds that are choked with quack grass and creeping Charlie.

That’s excellent advice from The Complete Flower Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler and Barbara W. Ellis. Too bad their book wasn’t written in 1993, when I started work on my second flower bed. On second thought, it’s not at all certain that I would have recognized that advice as applying to me. I was keeping up on my first bed–The Birthday Garden–and there were neglected irises elsewhere in the yard that needed lifting and dividing, and then, of course, I’d have to make a bed to plant them in. Yes, there was always a good reason for creating yet another bed, and I was always confident that next year everything would be under control.

It was just two years ago that it finally started to dawn on me that I was in over my head. Something more drastic than triage weeding was called for. I had to think about eliminating entire beds.

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