Far from perfect…
The excitement of seeing our grass emerging followed with a realisation that this living scape will not tend to itself. On closer examination, I realised that our lovely lawn had quite a lot of skutch grass, a very determined weed that will take over given half a chance. I consulted google to see what was the best way to deal with this ‘wild’ grass and discovered that this weed means business. It rapidly takes root early in spring to get a head start and creates a network of roots to colonise a territory. The options are to dig it out or nuke it with weed killer (but this would also kill our lovely lawn) if you choose the manual option, all roots need to get extracted or it will just keep popping back like the ultimate whack a mole.
I now realise that seeding the lawn is the nice fun bit, the real work starts now, much like bringing home your darlings from the hospital, nothing really prepares you. I started trying to remove the clumps of skutch grass with a hoe and a weeding tool and reseeding the areas. I was amazed at how quickly it has taken hold and I regret not tackling it sooner. I also read that the weed sends out a poison to inhibit the growth of other plants, I think I have a bit of a battle on my hands to tame the wilderness.
Interestingly, the areas that we seeded in December have established well and are suppressing the skutch grass, even though we were warned it was the wrong time to sow grass and we were wasting our time. We were also told that if we left the soil unseeded, the weeds would take hold. Damned if you do. To be honest, I did notice the tufts of grass when we were seeding the lawn but I thought it was fairly harmless and would be over-run by the buckets of seeds I was heaping on the lawn, but was probably feeding all the local birds.
We also seeded part of the garden with wild-flower seeds, I had the illusion that we would have an instant meadow with colour, that will save investing in planting this year, this seems to be a very slow horse so far and the skutch grass is given me plenty of work to keep this dream alive.
Inch by inch, row by row, going to make this garden grow….
