Weed, the Legal Stuff

Oh I remember the good old days of gardens filled with unwanted liriope. Those heady days when I thought that removing that scourge from my garden would be the end of my worries.

Well the liriope plugs that we pull each year have diminished to a small handful. Meanwhile, new assaults are being waged by various invasive and unwanted species.

There is literally no space in our garden. It is filled up with weeds. All that greenery between the iris fronds and the grass line? Weeds. (Don't mind the straw - it was an attempt to get grass to grow in a different area and some of it blew into the garden.) It's so pervasive it's quite hard to uproot because the process seems to involves digging up and upturning almost all the soil without accidentally uprooting desirable plants just below the surface.

 The most noticeable int he above picture appears to be what is called wild violet:

It is choking our flowers and hostas and is all over our front and back lawn as well. In the grass, it might be a lost cause unless we opt to use a herbicide. We tend to avoid doing that kind of thing on the grass, where the kids are playing. Honestly if it's green and sending down roots to help with soil erosion, we usually just live with it and mow it when it gets to high. In the garden though, it seems to be taking over.

Next up is this one, mostly gathered around the trunk of the cherry tree, may possibly be called Henbit:

Finally, we have a lot of butter cup (I didn't take a picture of that). All of these weeds seem to be mostly newcomers this year. We've had violet in the yard before but now it has really made a home in our garden bed. We also have plants that we deliberately introduced to the garden that have taken over. Our strawberries have grown wild and sent runners everywhere. I don't target them for uprooting, but I'm not careful with them either. Otherwise the irises and black-eyed Susans seem to have taken over - but they are welcome.

With effort, I weeded a small plot of garden. It looks so naked now without the weeds there. Hopefully now that they aren't so crowded, the other plants can start to thrive.

Some mulch made the whole thing look much nicer, and might help dissuade weeds from taking roots.

 There's a pretty ugly and obvious line where I stopped. I have quite a lot more work ahead of me...