No more jobs got ticked off the list today. I spent the morning doing another stint around the garden railway, teasing grass out of the gravel and cutting back the faded heads of thyme. Some of the grass is a fine leaved annual, comparatively harmless apart from the fact that it seeded, so there'll be more next year. It used to infest part of the long border next to the railway, but I pretty much got rid of it through a mixture of assiduous weeding and aggressive mulching. Mulching isn't really going to help in the gravel, since the only thing I could use as a mulch would be more gravel, which makes a superb seed bed, but I'm fairly confident that with regular attention the fine leaved grass can be brought under control.
There are also two sorts of perennial grass with running roots, one thick and white, the other fine as horsehair between the tufts of leaves. These are more of a problem, since they have infiltrated the base of the ivy hedge, and the roots of some of the shrubs in the long bed. At the moment I'm forking out what I can, and will try zapping outlying shoots with glyphosate , when they appear safely out of range of any plants I want to keep. I darkly suspect that the best I will ever do with the perennial grasses is keep them down to low levels of infestation, short of clearing the front garden of all vegetative life and maintaining a bare earth policy through regular applications of weedkiller for at least two seasons. Which seems rather extreme.
I don't mind weeding the gravel. It has a pleasant, meditative quality, and the bits you have finished look very neat and tidy, so you have a visible payback for your efforts. However, it won't be ticked off the list for ages because the area to be tidied up is large, and I only do two or three hours weeding at a stretch. The planting definitely needs to be thicker, since the thyme has not been good at suppressing weeds, although it is pretty in flower and the bees like it. As I weeded I pondered what else would grow with it. I'm currently inclined towards low growing sedum, which I can imagine intermingling and forming an insect friendly mat.
In the afternoon I tackled the patio (or terrace), which would have been a fairly quick job if my criteria for Tidy patio had not included tidying the bed of winter flowering iris as an implicit part of the job. I never got round to it before last winter, and the display of flowers was not improved by the background of tatty dead leaves mixed in among the living. Pulling the dead foliage out of established clumps of Iris unguicularis not merely takes ages, but is a task which is never obviously finished. It's practically impossible to pick out every withered brown leaf, for they are myriad, gradually shrivelling and becoming wispy with age. How many wisps do you have to have combed out with your fingertips, and how many may remain, before you can say that the job is done?
Clearing the dead leaves out from the back of the bed revealed a spectacular number of snails clinging to the wall. It's no surprise that the iris flowers were so badly eaten last winter. I left the snails for now, since I was not in a murdering frame of mind, but I fear I'll have to do something about them before next winter. Maybe I should put them all in a bucket and take them down to lane to live on the grass verge of the lettuce field. I can't remember how far you have to take a snail before it can't find its way home, but the internet will tell me, since that very question was the subject of a Radio 4 citizen science competition a year or two back.
Addendum Today, August 23rd, is the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Mons. The Systems Administrator predicted that after all the media fuss about the outbreak of war, the anniversary of the first major battle would be ignored. Sure enough, I haven't seen or heard a single reference to it from the BBC or any of the broadsheets.
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