My philosophy on weeding

My in-laws visited yesterday to share a cup of tea and a homemade muffin in the garden. My father-in-law asked me what my philosophy on weeding was, as he “knows I won’t spray them.” But he wasn’t really interested, he was just saying that he thought my garden was weedy and he didn’t approve. It’s the second time he has made a similar comment this year.

His timing sucks. I invited them to visit so that they could see I was doing OK after a surgeon took a lump out of my leg on Tuesday. I am hobbling around the garden on crutches. I did manage to weed the asparagus bed on Friday morning, but only because Ryan was distracted and I had done it before he realised what I was doing! In my defence, a shark’s fin melon had taken root there and was threatening to grow right over the shed and escape out into the car park. They grow a mile-a-minute.

It’s only two weeks since a biopsy confirmed that the lump wasn’t cancerous, so you can probably imagine that the preceding weeks were a little fraught. This is on top of living through an unprecedented global pandemic that has made life tougher for everyone this year. And it didn’t stop raining until April, and then there was a heatwave, and I still have a day job, so when, exactly, was I supposed to do all that weeding?

My outrage has worn off a little bit (although if he’s lucky enough to be invited back, he’s not getting a muffin!). So I have been thinking about my philosophy on weeding, which is more complicated than a conversation with my FIL can encompass.

I have always been an organic gardener, so no – I don’t spray weeds. I use other methods to control them, including bark chip mulches (not available this year with the garden centres closed). Usually, I pull them weeds by hand,