more weeding and clearing

To my surprise there was no frost on the grass this morning.  Indeed, by eleven I spotted one industrious honeybee foraging on the Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun'.  Unfortunately I missed the first part of this unexpected good fortune as I needed to go to the supermarket, where I experienced a moment of anxiety after finishing my shopping when I couldn't see my car where I knew I'd left it, before remembering that I was looking for the Systems Administrator's silver Skoda and not a red one.  I did find it difficult to believe that anybody would have stolen my car in broad daylight from the Waitrose car park.  It is fairly battered, first registered in March 2006, and is so entry level that when I bought it, the salesman pointed out the plastic clip inside the windscreen for holding car park tickets, not in a spirit of irony but because there were no other features to highlight.

With what remained of the day I bashed on clearing the weeds around the wildlife pond.  There are an awful lot of goose grass seedlings, which is a nuisance since it means there is going to go on being a lot of goose grass coming up every year for the foreseeable future.  Come retreat to the easy-to-manage retirement bungalow or death, whichever happens sooner, I am pretty sure that goose grass will still be coming up.

I chopped at the nettle and bramble roots with my pick axe and hauled lustily, only remembering late in the afternoon that I'd forgotten to take my wedding ring off.  Fortunately I had not bent it again.  By the time it got dark I'd filled two old Strulch bags with bits of nettle and sprays of burdock seeds, and the Systems Administrator's small garden trailer with bits of bramble.  At least the docks are not resprouting too badly.  I read somewhere that as long as you take off the top few inches of root they will not shoot again from the buried tip, unlike dandelions, and it seems to be true.  I dug out a lot of docks out in the spring and they have mostly not grown back.

I have got to plant something on the cleared earth, though.  I spread the existing primroses around a bit, which will help, but I need ground cover, otherwise I am locked into an endless Sisyphean  cycle of weeding every winter, only to see the weeds grow back each summer.  The Beth Chatto and Dorset Perennials websites beckon.