Garden log: early November

The intimacy of weeds

My technique for removing oxalis is imperfect. I know that.

That said, I’m not sure there is a perfect technique short of a small nuclear explosion, so those of us among the oxalis-afflicted must do as best we can.

In open space I spray it, joyously. This is what glyphosate was made for: killing oxalis, quite quickly, and gardeners, quite slowly. It works, though even when sprayed, doused, soused and drowned the damn stuff pops back in a month or two. Rinse. Repeat.

There’s no real pleasure in this, just a dull necessity. This is the hardiest, most prolific of weeds. Any fragment of its root system left in the ground can grow as a new plant, so cultivation encourages it terribly. Pulling at it is just asking for more.

It’s littered through all our vege beds, taking such a hold in one that I folded my cards, pulled everything up and then both sprayed and replaced the soil. Seems to have done the trick so far. In the other beds I just do my best to keep on top of it, though tweaking oxalis from lines of closely planted carrots is work only for the devoted and patient.

The carrots, by the by, are doing well, little orbs of Paris Market, full of sweetness and crunch. That’s the autumn sowing, just maturing now. I’ve got more just showing its first fringe of green, so hopefully a myself-perpetuating carrot cycle has begun. The sprouting broccoli has been decent enough, garlic is thickening up at the stem, the broad beans have offered their first tender little pickings and over in the asparagus bed the first-year spears have emerged and been ignored to flop in long thin ferny wands. Three rows of beans went in at the weekend.

Elsewhere in the garden where oxalis’s little clovery leaves and evil white stems squeeze between plants and punctuate the open spaces I get down on my knees and hand weed.

Yes, this is an exercise in futility. The oxalis will be back, though I tell myself that I am at last providing a pretty solid interruption to its optimal life cycle, so must be doing some kind of good.

My technique is to get stuck in with a trowel and loosen beneath the plant and tweak its long root from the soil. Then I sift the soil in my fingers plucking as many little tendrils of surrounding white root as I can. I realise that the goal should be to dig down and find the corms that are literally the root of the problem, but that means significant disturbance, and is hard in an establishing garden.

So, every wee while I spend at least a day, more, picking over every inch of quite large garden areas with a trowel and a bucket. I get there. The sea of shamrocky leaf is diminished and the bi product is something I have come to really value.

What’s that? A true, granular intimacy with this garden, the soil and the plants in it. Digging over every inch, running that soil through my bare fingers, loosening, turning. I know its texture, its moisture, its scent and feeling. I know the condition of every plant from close inspection. I crawl into it, I move among it. And for that, I thank the oxalis.