out, damned vetch

Giving good advice is one thing, but taking it is quite another.  Today I actually followed my own sensible thought that I should pace myself with the shears and the hand trowel, to avoid ending up spraining my wrist or forearm.  Instead, I turned my attentions to rooting out the Coronilla varia from the island bed.  Probing at its roots with the border fork, and going after little pieces of root with the hand fork, ought to use different muscles to chopping with the shears and digging holes for the ox eye daisies in the bottom lawn.

I've been in two minds about the Coronilla varia for a while.  It is a herbaceous member of the pea family, with healthy looking mid green, mid sized leaves and pink flowers over a very long period. Bees love it.  It seems to suffer from no pests and diseases, unlike its pea family relatives the tree lupins that have their own huge and horrible form of aphid, so disgusting that even the birds won't eat them.  It tolerates drought.  All that makes it sound like a splendid plant, which it is, hence I've been in two minds about it.  The trouble is, it does not know when to stop.  Its roots run underground, at first looking small and innocent, but thickening rapidly.  They dive into the centres of other plants, and the stems wind their way up through any neighbours standing it its way.  Shade and the canopy of shrubs don't stop it, it just climbs through them.

I should have been warned by the plant centre's label saying Spread Indefinite.  That is nursery code for It runs, maybe a lot.  Since starting to see how much and how rapidly it spread I have read up on it on the internet, and seen it recommended for stabilising embankments, and I should think it would be very good at that, but it has no place in a mixed border.  In fact, I don't think my former employer should be selling it without a more explicit warning.  One reason why nowadays I am happy to buy most of my plants online is that I can check their requirements and peculiar habits from the comfort of my sofa, without being swayed by how pretty they look in their pots.

I tried weeding round the edges of it at the start of this season, to see if it could be kept to a reasonable area, but it can't.  It has delved deep beneath a Yucca, and infiltrated some Physostegia which I want to keep and which also runs but not insanely, and it is going to take me several years of weeding out or poisoning any regrowth I see before I've eliminated it entirely, but the bulk of it has now been pulled and dug out, heaped in great piles over the lawn pending a trip to the dump.  I wouldn't trust those roots in my compost heap, no Sir.  I briefly wondered if I could use it in a wilder part of the garden, but then thought that repeating the same action in hope of a different outcome was indeed a mark of madness.  I have learned my lesson.  No more Coronilla varia.  I would not honestly trust it even on an embankment, if I had one that needed stabilising, in case it spread out into the surrounding countryside.

Meanwhile I have come to the end of my present stint as chief cook.  We had the last of the roast chicken for lunch today, in the form of leek and potato soup made with the stock from the carcass. It was a good stock that set to a proper jelly, not just vaguely flavoured water that once had some chicken bones in it.  Free range birds definitely yield better stock than intensively farmed, not that I buy the latter nowadays.  I'd rather go vegetarian.  I used to put a squeeze of lemon in leek soup, before the Systems Administrator fessed up to not liking it, so now I don't.

The only disappointment of the week, apart from some of my timings being a bit out, was the black bean charros from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian.  This a Mexican stew, in which you liquidize some of the cooked beans to thicken it.  The dividing line between a thick soupy mixture and a paste that stuck to the saucepan turned out to be a fine one, and so some of our bean charros remained uneaten in the bottom of the pan, but its main disadvantage was that it didn't seem to taste of much, beside bean paste.  It was flavoured with onions, garlic, green chilli and coriander, and I upped the amount of onion because the recipe sounded mean, but it still barely managed to come through the beans.  The SA said bravely that it was nice, just maybe needed some more vegetables like a chopped red pepper to give it some more taste and some texture.  I thought that by the time you'd stripped taste and texture out of a stew there wasn't much left to be said for it, but we agreed that red pepper and some sweetcorn would make it more interesting.  Four out of ten maximum for the black bean charros.  I might try again, with the extras, because I've still got most of the bag of beans left.