weeding the long bed

I have started weeding the long bed in the front garden.  I couldn't decide which end to start, and compromised on starting in the middle, which makes sense since that's where the small bulbs are concentrated.  The weeds aren't too bad, apart from various sorts of grass, but the blanket of Strulch has completely rotted down, and the whole bed needs mulching with bulky organic material, feeding, and topping with fresh Strulch.  How much of that happens is another story, dependent on weather and health.  If it stays reasonably mild and I remain fit and healthy I might even get it done.  If it freezes solid after Christmas and I succumb to a series of colds it most definitely won't.

Sometimes I think that the long bed was a mistake, and that I should have laid out the whole of the front garden as a spectacular gravel planting to make the most of the drainage, but after a day or two fingertip weeding the gravel I do have and picking out autumn leaves I remember that I wouldn't have the time or energy to look after that much gravel.  You can't chuck down bags of weed suppressing Strulch over gravel.  Derry Watkins of the Special Plants Nursery near Bath writes that gravel itself can indeed act as a curb to weeds, but you need to lay it eight inches thick. That's too much gravel.

The weed grass comes in several varieties.  There is one with a running root, which has infiltrated the ivy hedge round the border.  I pull up what I can, but know that I will never get it all out of the hedge.  It mostly runs, but odd roots plunge deep, and in past years when I've cleared quite large patches of the bed for replanting and dug them over extremely thoroughly the grass has still bobbed up here and there in the dug over areas.  Since I am not going to strip away the bed and the ivy hedge and get someone in to sterilise the soil under black plastic for an entire season using the sort of horticultural chemicals that aren't available to the public I have to live with the running grass, and winkle pieces out when I see them.

There is another that makes big tufts and sends up fat seed heads on straight stalks two feet tall. Last summer I resorted to dead heading some of the tufts, so that at least they would not seed further before I'd had time to deal with them.  The tufts do not run at the root and are straightforward to dig out when you have time to crawl in among all the other things to do it.

Today's nuisance was a fine leaved annual grass, much daintier than Poa annua, which forms gradually widening little clumps that coalesce into mats where it's thick.  It lives in the gravel as well, given a chance.  I managed to weed much of it out two years ago before it could set seed, and this summer it wasn't so bad in the gravel, but has formed extensive patches in the long bed without the protection of the Strulch.  I stand a sporting chance of winning against this grass in the end if I keep at it.

The first couple of sessions spent on the long bed are always vaguely disheartening, because it seems so large and the little area one has cleared looks so small.  The planting in the bed is fairly mature by now, with shrubs that have been in there for up to twenty years, and as you try to move among it for maintenance there are numerous dead ends.  I am trying to plan the work so that I don't have to keep walking across areas after I've weeded and mulched them, but this does mean my first two bags of spent mushroom compost have gone down in an obscure space at the back, not even visible from the drive, which contributed to the overall sense of much work and little visible progress.  Still, experience teaches that as long as I can keep at it the mulched area will advance like the stealthy passage of the tide up a beach.

Addendum  We didn't catch any rabbits.  I wasn't really expecting to on the first night, and as I pulled up the bathroom blind the mocking spot of orange carrot in the trap confirmed that I still had the bait and no bunny.  I went to check the other as well after breakfast, and again in the afternoon before it got dark, but had no luck.