outdoor housework

Today I weeded along the front of the house.  It's not a glamorous job, but somebody has to do it. At one end is poor old Pileostegia viburnoides, which suffered badly when I let the Boston Ivy grow over it.  The vine has been curtailed, but the Pileostegia is taking its time making good the spectacular die back it went through during its period of perpetual darkness.  Apparently learning from experience it was sending one new shoot outwards away from the wall, but I managed to twiddle that round so that it was pointing in again.  They are supposed to like rich living, so I am asking a lot planting it in our sand, and must give it another can of liquid seaweed tomorrow.

I removed a generous crop of oxalis and sow thistles from that stretch of gravel.  The thistles shot up from almost ignorable to unmistakably present in the space of about a week.  I left the self sown crop of bladder campion, or Silene vulgaris, to get on with it.  I originally introduced the campion as an addition to the daffodil lawn, but it didn't want to live there at all, much preferring the gaps in the patio (or terrace) and the gravel along the front of the house.  This makes me think that it either dislikes competition from grass, or likes lime, or both.  The white flowers are pretty, and having a wildflower (or weed) running along the footings and bumping into the trimmed box dome by the front door is quite amusing.

There was lots more oxalis by the front door step.  That went in the bag of weeds to go to the dump.  Also one self-sown juniper, which I'm not sure if I want to use elsewhere or not, so left for now.  The juniper under the cloakroom window has grown into a terrifying monster, regularly spreading beyond its allotted space so that visitors parking by the door find the passenger trying to climb out into a knee deep mat of juniper.  It's for the chop, to be replaced by something more architectural and restrained, but not at this moment.

Then came assorted species of grass, all weeds, and a lot of goosegrass, and some kind of bittercress relative that had, alas, already seeded.  Also a gigantic dead nettle, name unknown.  I am better at recognising my weeds than naming them.  The dead nettle hadn't yet flowered, so its stems could go on the home compost heap.  Finally I got to the true nettle by the outside tap, which I should have dealt with weeks ago, since it has stung me every other time I used the tap for weeks.  I couldn't extract all the roots of that one from the Chaenomeles, so will have to treat the regrowth with poison.

The Chaenomeles, which had to be butchered so that we could get at the blocked drain, is sprouting again from ground level, as I hoped it would.  For good measure I finished scraping up the remains of the rotted down bark mulch from in front of the woodshed, and replaced the mypex fabric over the manhole cover.  Once I've collected enough stones to cover the rest of the fabric it will look quite tidy.  I've grumbled about it before, but it bears repeating: do not use chopped bark over landscape fabric for paths.  It will decompose, and weeds of all sorts will grow in the composted remains.  I felt a sort of domestic satisfaction when I'd finished, though it was scarcely high horticulture.