More weeding!

Having been away for the weekend on Tuesday I needed to catch up with the weeding. The last few visits to my plot I have had to concentrate on weeding and today was no exception. After borrowing John Bachelor's strimmer to tidy up the long grass just outside my plot, I was horrified to see, or rather not see, my strawberries. They were completely swamped by chickweed. Now chickweed is a sign of fertile soil I am told, but it doesn't do any good for strawberries to be covered in them. It took over an hour to hand weed the bed. The photo shows the job part done and how thick the matt of weeds had got.
    I pulled out everything except the bindweed. This I teased out and laid to one side as can be seen in the foreground of the photo. Then when I had finished weeding I fetched my glyphosate spray and a bottomless bottle. Two plants were so big I could lay them off the bed onto bare ground and spray the foliage but the smaller plants, in amongst the strawberries, I stuffed into the bottom of the bottle and then sprayed into the neck of the bottle. If you keep the open end close to the ground none of the spray can escape onto the crop but the weeds inside gets a good soaking. Just be careful not to allow the wet weed leaves to brush against the crop as you remove the bottle.
​I try to only use glyphosate on bindweed and thistles where the root is almost impossible to pull out completely, even with a fork.
​    I was reminded that my New Year's resolution to hoe before the weeds got too large had gone by the wayside and I was now suffering the consequences. While the weeds this year have grown faster than I have known before, that is no excuse as my neighbours have managed to keep their plots tidy.
    I finished off pushing the hoe through between my autumn sown broad beans in an effort to remove the worst of the weeds without chopping off the bean plants. While doing this I noticed that the blackfly had started colonizing the tips of the plants so when I had cleared most of the weeds I fetched my pyrethrum spray and pinched of all the tips of that row and the first spring sown beans, giving each plant a quick spray to deal with those that blackfly that may have migrated further down the stem.
    By then it was way past lunchtime so I went home leaving piles of pulled weeds scattered around the plot waiting to be added to the compost heap, hopefully tomorrow - and a large patch of thick grass and weeds at the far end of my plot to deal with as well.

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