A Bucket Full of Weeds.

What better way to honour the garden on the first day of spring than to spend an hour or two pulling up weeds?

Up until about a week ago, my bleating about the nature-strip-we-call-a-lawn consisted of: "If it's green it's a weed!"  

This proved to be correct in one hundred percent of cases as Mr Honey Pie tried to prove me wrong.

So today, I did something about it and targeted bindii, winter grass, paspalum and a grassy thing that eventually grows feathery looking seed.

I've got a long way to go yet, especially with the winter grass.  Today I concentrated on eliminating as much of the weeds with seeds on them as possible.

I don't like to use herbicides so most of my weeding is done with my hand held gardening tools or simple pulling.

Any weeds which have set seed, or which have runners, suckers, bulbs, etc. NEVER go in the compost bin.

Depending on the circumstances, they either go in the rubbish bin and are taken away, 

or into a large bucket and the weeds are then covered with water.

I place a tight fitting lid on the bucket and the whole lot left for at least a month.

During that time the weeds should turn to mush  and producing a nutrient rich plant tea.

Water down the resulting tea until it is the colour of a light tea and use it as a liquid fertilizer on your garden.

Sometimes I eradicate broadleaved weeds in the nature strip with a sprinkling of sulphate of ammonia.

But because we are so close to bushland I do this as little as possible.

The nature strip is hard to keep vegetated because of the steep incline.

Every time we have a heavy downpour, patches of soil are washed away.

I have found that applying a native mulch to bare patches of lawn assist in preventing soil to wash away and eventually for the couch grass to take hold.

It's been a slow process but our nature strip is gradually taking shape.

The nature strip provides the only lawn area in our garden because areas of our garden are either bush garden or vegetable/herb garden.

In the build up to spring, some flecks of green are appearing in the couch grass which has suffered over the winter months.

Spring is on its way in the Southern Hemisphere.