aspenhill's blog: Age Old Gardening Challenges

Northern Virginia has been experiencing very pleasant weather for July over the last few days. The temperatures in the early morning hours start out in the high 60s, gradually warming up to the mid 80s throughout the day, but with low humidity. What a difference from the 100s+ heat wave of a week ago! I've been taking full advantage of it by working in the gardens for most of the daylight hours. Most of my time has been spent weeding. The weeds are so out of hand this year and I am in despair that I'll never even get the first round of major weeding done in the garden beds, let alone be able to keep up with any kind of routine maintenance weeding.

My thoughts during the long hours of recent weeding have been on several gardening challenges, and I've realized that these challenges are age old. They are not unique to my gardens and are not unique to this period in time.

A huge challenge is regarding the weeds. I've never used a pre-emergent killer such as Preen. With so much garden space to fill in, I've wanted the perennials that are prone to self seeding about to do their thing. If I use a pre-emergent killer, it would likely help with the desirable outcome of curtailing some of the weed population, but it would also likely have the undesirable outcome of curtailing the perennials self seeding. I've had luck with self seeding from hellebores, columbine, brunnera, thalictrum, cimicifuga, phlox divaricata, monarda, big root geranium, monkshood, jacobs ladder, fringed bleeding heart, old fashioned bleeding heart, asarum canadense, obedient plant, stachys humelo, and I'm sure there are others that aren't coming to mind right now. From experience, I know there will be less weeds when the perennials fill in, but dealing with the volume of weeds until then is absolutely daunting. Mulch helps but certainly doesn't eliminate the weed problem. Putting my mind to this challenge and observing my garden areas, I see that there are several garden beds that have really filled in and are easily managed with very little weeding to be done. Then there are other areas that are not filled in but that I don't want to fill in, like under shrubs, narrow separations between clumps of filled in perennials, and the woods just beyond the cultivated garden areas. I'm going to use Preen and/or Roundup in those places and see how it goes. I'll just have to bite the bullet with continuing major manual weeding efforts in the areas that I still want perennials self seeding fill in.

Another challenge is garden design to get to my ideal of a perfect state between the plantings at first being too sparse and then being too overcrowded as everything matures. Lots of what I call "editing". The self seedlings are great, but they usually don't end up exactly where I think they would look best, so I spend time digging them up and relocating them. As the plants themselves mature they start crowding into their neighbors, so I also spend time digging them up, dividing them, putting part of the initial plant back in place, and relocating the divisions. This repeats year after year, one of those things that is never "done".

My greatest pleasure comes from gardening. I enjoy and find peace of mind when I'm immersed in it whether it is dealing with challenges or delighting in successes. All I truly hope for is that I will be able to accomplish a single gardening season during my lifetime when all half started projects have been finished and every garden bed is at its maintained best

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