I was recently reading the newest novel by one of my favorite authors. The heroine was upset about the many ordeals she was facing so to relax she went outside to deadhead her perennials for an hour. So far, so good. Gardening is a wonderful way to relieve stress and spend some quiet time letting your mind wander wherever it chooses to go. Many problems can be solved by spending a peaceful hour in the garden.
Then, the heroine gathered up all the flower tops she had cut off and put them in the garbage. In the GARBAGE! No, no, WRONG!
What do you do with your weeds and deadheaded flowers? Until I got a job working for a very meticulous city gardener named Willie, I always threw the weeds right down on the soil next to where they had grown. That’s what my mother did so that’s what I did. In a day or so the weeds would shrivel up or compost right in place, or bugs or worms or birds would use them and they would be recycled back into nature. When we pulled long grass along our fence line we laid the grass along the base of the fence as a mulch to prevent further weeds from growing. If we cut off a flower head and weren’t saving it for seed we just let it fall to the ground.
It was a shock when I went to work for Willie and he wanted me to remove the pulled weeds from the bed. The saving grace was that he had a compost bin so the weeds all went in there. It seemed more sensible to me to let the weeds compost where they fell rather than moving them to the compost bin and then moving them back again after they were composted, but I did what I was getting paid for. I have to admit that Willie’s gardens always looked absolutely perfect when I finished my work.
At home I still let the weeds lie in the flower bed or garden from which they were pulled. When I have a great amount of them I might put them in the compost bin or dig a hole in the garden and bury them so they can compost underground. Or I just leave them in a pile between the rows of beans to act as a mulch. Except for a few weeds that should be removed from the beds because they will re-root if left on the soil, purslane for example, they will disappear in a matter of days. Weeds should be turned root side up if rain is expected because any weed can be tricky and re-root if given the right conditions
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