I have been planting my sedum cuttings out into the gravel. They were slow to make roots in their pots, while throwing out white aerial roots from their stems, and will probably be happier in the ground than sitting in their compost in the cold frame.
They looked astonishingly unlike the parent plants growing outside. In comparison, the cuttings had bigger leaves and laxer habits, with their leaves much further apart on the stems (or longer internodes, if you want to be technical about it). Their colour was different too. Old gold had turned to pale lime green, and bronze red to plain grey. If I hadn't taken the cuttings myself, and labelled the pots, I'd have had grave doubts as to whether they were even the same variety. They looked desperately floppy and vulnerable set down in the gravel, but should harden off, and by next year appear totally at home. The outdoor plants, harder grown and with higher light exposure, were considerably more attractive.
The thyme in the gravel is bushing out nicely, and the flowers when they come should be very attractive, to our eyes and to the bees. The sedums are all low growing varieties, and are being slotted into gaps between the thymes, the aim being that in the summer months there should be a solid carpet of foliage, broken only by narrow paths. We may need some subsidiary paths or at least stepping stones to give access to the little buildings as the railway landscaping takes shape, but that bit is up to the Systems Administrator. My aim is just to cut down on the area of exposed, weed infested gravel.
I could do with more sedums, and it occurred to me as I dug holes large enough to take their rootballs that next time there was no need to finish them in 9cm pots before planting them out. If I used four by eight divided trays, and stuck one cutting in per module, I reckon I could drop the plugs straight into the gravel as soon as they were rooted. That's how I did the thyme originally, though by now my original planting has been usefully bulked up by self seeding.
The parts of the railway gravel I didn't manage to weed in the spring are still infested with an annual grass whose name I don't know. It is not the common Poa annua, instead it has very narrow, fine foliage and a strongly upright habit. It is just running up to seed, but fortunately is mostly tall enough to stand above the mats of thyme and Arenaria monatana, so that I can run my hand across them and pull the grass stems out in handfuls. The area I weeded earlier in the year is relatively grass free, and if I can pull it out before it seeds this year then I think I'll be well on the way to controlling it. It used to infest parts of the long border in the front garden before I managed to largely eliminate it through a combination of weeding and Strulch, but of course I can't mulch the gravel except with more gravel.
Less easy to control are the patches of perennial weed grasses with running roots. Some have worked their way in among the SA's little conifers and other small shrubs, and I don't suppose we'll ever managed to eliminate them entirely. My strategy at the moment is to dig out what roots I can get at without causing too much damage to the planting in the gravel, then do it again once I can see the regrowth, then try hitting the further regrowth with glyphosate. Weeds with running roots are one of the hardest things to control in a densely planted garden. In the back garden we've got creeping thistle wandering through the rose beds* and bog bed, and some kind of loosestrife entrenched among the roots of a Japanese quince, from whence it ventures out through an area of polyanthus. There's another outbreak of loosestrife in the rose bed, along with something like a less prickly thistle that's new this year. I don't recognise the leaves, but don't trust the look of them.
As the creeping weeds emerge in the spring a dead calm early morning in April or early May will see me out there with the weedkiller, trying to very carefully drizzle it down the stems of the thistle and loosestrife while not letting it drip or drift on to anything else. By summer the borders are such a jungle of growth that it's difficult to get at the thistles, let alone spray them and not their neighbours, so all I can do is yank them out, each stem with a pathetic piece of root attached. Thus I never get rid of them entirely, and they return anew every spring, weaker than they would be without my efforts but not vanquished.
*I recall from some book read in childhood a character crooning the ditty 'For where you plant a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow'. This is patently untrue. Roses do not suppress thistles.
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