We don’t use chemicals such as Glyphosate in our gardening practice at Secret Garden, and pride ourselves on our hand weeding skills. Glyphosate has been proven to cause cancer and will kill all wildlife that it comes into contact with.
As you can see, there were a lot of weeds and grass that had blown in and self seeded, including a rather lovely Caper Spurge on the left of this photo. It was a hot afternoon, but we set to work using spades and trowels to slice off the weeds and get into the cracks in the paving.
This front border was mulched with a layer of pebbles and membrane so most of these weeds came up fairly easily. The dry weather also made this job quite quick as the soil is so dusty. A couple of smaller Carex grasses weren’t looking their best, so we cut them back to give them more vigour.
We delved into this side border, cutting back and shaping the Pittosporum, and removed the Miscanthus, which had become too large right in front of the Pittosporum.
We raked off dead material from the border and cut the Miscanthus right back so that it would do better when transplanted.
The weeds around the driveway were removed. We will come back soon to jet wash and brush in kiln dried sand to the driveway.
We dug a hole in the front border to add the Miscanthus, making sure to pull back the membrane and pebbles so that these could be re-laid around it. We had wanted to divide it into two and add one plant on either end of this border, but the left hand side has a drain making it impossible to plant anything. We used a spade to scrape off weeds along the kerbside and pavement area in front of the driveway. Keeping this area weed free in Bristol is a good idea if you don’t want the council to spray Glyphosate outside your home.
We rather liked the Caper spurge, but they can become invasive, and our customer was keen that we remove it, so that went to the great compost in the sky to be recycled into new life.
Bristol City Council are setting up a procedure so that streets can get together to decide if they do not want chemicals sprayed on their pavements and road. If you can maintain the area around your property, then the council will not step in using Glyphosate. Using chemicals in residential streets is awful. Plants (weeds) build up a tolerance to them, making them ineffective, and someone will need to come back to scrape away the remnants of the plant anyway. It’s like doing the job twice. Not only are the chemicals dangerous for the workers that use them (their PPE is minimal), having these chemicals sprayed on our streets is toxic to people, pets and wildlife. You can email your local councillor, or contact the council here to report or discuss an issue.
We are pleased with the result of this hand weeding session. It didn’t take that long, and we did a fantastic job. We are looking forward to planting an extra plant and mulching this main border next week. Come back again soon to see what we are up to…
