I had two large bulk bags of gravel delivered last week, now that I've cut back the hedge and delivery lorries have a chance of getting in. The driver was able to offload them at the edge of the turning circle nearest to the stretch of railway garden that needs topping up, instead of having to dump them just inside the entrance like he did last time. I was seized with last minute doubts that he might be in danger of hitting the telephone wire with his hoist, but he assured me it would be perfectly safe, unloaded them without incident, and reversed out with no more damage than running over a couple of teazels, and he had warned me that he would probably run over the thistles before venturing in. The gravel comes from Silverton Aggregates, and I can warmly recommend them to anybody in north east Essex planning to buy gravel.
The bags looked very big, sitting there at the edge of the turning circle. Larger than the bulk bags I bought last time, though in reality they can't be. I left them untouched for a couple of days, as I was busy cutting things down in the back garden, but this afternoon conscience caught up with me, and I thought that I had better make a start at using all that gravel. They are not things of beauty, the bulk bags, and it would be nice not to have them where they are until late summer 2015.
The railway garden is infested with a fine leaved annual grass, whose name I do not know but it is not Poa annua. I weeded it over the summer, but autumn has brought a new crop, not as much as there was before, but still it needs dealing with. Gravel does not suppress the germination of weeds. I am beginning to sound like a stuck record saying that (for any readers under thirty who are not too sure what a stuck record is, look up vinyl LPs on Wikipedia), but gravel makes a great seed bed. The point of adding more gravel is therefore not to stop the weed grass appearing, because it won't, but to make it easier to remove. Weeding thick gravel is comparatively easy. You rub your hand over the weeds, stirring the gravel about, and they come loose. You pick them out, put them in a bucket and voila, job done, clean and shining gravel. Compared to weeds growing through thin gravel but rooted in the earth beneath, weeds growing in the gravel itself have practically no purchase at all. (I presume that the Zen garden meditation practice of raking gravel daily has a simultaneous practical reason, to stop weeds growing in it).
As I worked my way around the railway I picked up the fallen leaves from the hedge as well, and dead-headed some of the heathers by way of variety. Initial progress seemed horribly slow, but once I'd weeded a big enough patch to be able to put down some shovelfuls of gravel without spilling on to parts I hadn't weeded yet, it began to look more hopeful, and by the time it got too dark to continue I could definitely see that I'd done something. Although I'd used up not quite one barrow full of gravel, and the bulk bags loomed as large as ever. It is going to take quite a while to use them up if the best I can manage is a barrow load per day.
Addendum The Silverton website did not say where the gravel was from. I just ordered 10 millimetre which is what we have always have. It looked identical to all the rest of the gravel, though, as did their last delivery, and I presume it is all from the same quarry, since nobody carts gravel further than they have to. We started off with Birch quarry gravel, because that was what the independent gravel merchant we used offered, and it looks like we're still on it.
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