How can something so small and sweet grow with such cunning and tenacity? And it's all my fault.
Thirty years ago, as we removed a new stretch of blackberry from what is now garden and orchard every year, I had a heck of a lot of bare shady ground that needed planting, fast, so the blackberry didn't have a chance to regrow. A friend offered me some of her native violets, but with a warning: "They spread."
I should have listened to her. Instead, I scattered them in random fashion on the newly cleared soil, as well as grasses and other seeds. I also planted the sweetly scented introduced Parma violet along the garden stairs, where theoretically the perfume would waft up to us each day.
The wallabies promptly ate the Parma violets. Presumably they tasted as sweet as they smelled. They left the native violets alone. And for a couple of decades the native violets did pretty much what we intended them to, filling the spaces that were too shady for native grasses and other ground covers, dying back in hot dry seasons when other ground covers took their place, returned when the "hot and dry" plants withered in their turn, and violets took their place.
Till last year. The winds that accompanied the 2019-20 bushfires carried seeds, mostly weed seeds, and it seems, native violet seeds as well, dropping a heap of them across my vegetable gardens.
The violets are not just a pest. They are a fast-growing disaster. Given bare ground and lots of rain and dull grey days, one tiny violet seems to become 30 in a week, gazing up at us as if to say "Thank you, we have found the perfect spot to grow. Now go away." I only have to haul out a bunch of gone-to-seed cabbages, and the following week the violets have taken over.
My response to vegetable garden weeds is usually to mulch over them thickly, wait a few weeks, then dig small holes in the mulch to plant new crops while the weeds below die. This works for most garden weeds, vetch, cleavers, baby thistles, even couch grass, as long as the mulch is thick enough. That method doesn't work for kikuyu grass, however, and it fails totally with violets too. Both kikuyu and violets quite like a loose covering of mulch - kikuyu can sneak its runners for metres underneath the wood chips, the lucerne hay or sugar cane mulch, emerging triumphant in the middle of the potatoes. Mulching violets lets them get their large root systems well established, ready to breed more violets, while only a few leaves and three cute little blooms appear overhead.
This leaves few choices:
1. Abandon the flower bed/vegetable garden et al and inform the violets that they've won. I'd be tempted to do this, but due to possibly excessive* tree planting, we have few areas with enough summer sunlight to grow vegetables.
*Opinions differ within our family on this subject.
2. Try herbicide. A kind friend, well qualified in herbicide use, used herbicide on a few stubborn plants for me last year, in a discrete way that hopefully didn't affect our garden frogs and other wildlife. The plants duly died off - and every one of them has come back this year. The "pour a kettle of nearly boiling water on it" works for most of the weeds in our paving, but does not work for violets. They appear to die, but the roots are still lurking underground, ready to spring to life again. Oil sprays work on some tender-leafed plants, but again, only temporarily on violets.
3. Sprinkle sulphate of ammonia (an artificial fertiliser) on the violets, or any other low-growing plants you wish to destroy, then cover them in clear (not black) plastic. The plants below will grow, then rot in the extra heat and moisture under the clear plastic, and that rot will slowly extend to roots, bulbs and rhizomes below the soil too. This methods works wonderfully, but the world already has too much plastic, plus it will not work in time to turn a bed of violets into a garden of tomatoes, basil and sweet corn.
4. Dig.
This is the simplest solution. It's also the most effective - but only if done well.
Digging out weeds sounds as simple as "how to come in out of the rain". Successful weed digging actually needs both expertise and practice. This is because a plant doesn't become a weed if it's easy to destroy.
Truly triumphant weeds prosper because the parts below ground will regrow even if the tops are repeatedly removed. We eradicated the quarter-hectare blackberry clumps in what is now our front garden by slashing it back, then mowing its attempts to grow back. Grasses and other native ground covers colonised the bare earth where the blackberry had been, and after three years of vigorous lawn mowing, the blackberry had exhausted its reserves, and hadn't reappeared there a quarter of a century later.
We've been mowing the violets in the area we think of as "front lawn" for at least 25 years, too. The violets grow back as strongly as the grass, dichondra, lawn daisies and the other groundcover inhabitants.
How to dig out a stubborn weed
Choose your tool. Mine is a kind of mini mattock, with its handle painted bright pink because it is used so often that it's easy to forget if I have to leave it to run in to answer the phone etc. I recommend painting the handle of all small tools in a bright colour that won't be camouflaged among the rhubarb or potatoes.
Other useful tools include spades, and a large garden fork (small aluminium ones probably won't have the strength to dig deeply enough) and a variety of long-handled tools developed by gardeners in many cultures over the centuries. Choose the one that suits you. I don't bend easily these days, so prefer a tool where I can sit on the ground and bash away. Others may like to stand and dig.
Now dig deep and wide. I use the "rule of three" for weeds. If a weed is 10cm wide, for example, dig at least 30cm down, and 30cm all around it.
Now sift through the soil you have dug out, removing every trace of roots or small bulblet - anything at all that seems as if it might be connected to the weed, or isn't pure soil.
Place the weeds in a compost bin, and don't use that compost in the vegetable garden, just in case the weed is still viable after composting. It shouldn't be, but I never trust a weed, on principle.
This may seem like a lot of work. It is. But if you don't do it properly, you'll have wasted time, back ache and dirty fingernails, and the weed will smugly grow back within a few weeks or months.
Just now, you might think the weeds are growing back even after a you've thoroughly dug your garden. They probably aren't - it's just that more weed seeds are germinating.
Dig again. According to old-fashioned gardening lore, a vegetable or flower garden needs to be dug three times before planting, unless you are prepared to battle the weeds in between the beans and petunias.
Hopefully, once this lot of violets are gone, I can just spread more mulch over the vegetable and flower gardens this summer, with no need to place my hands down into verdant weedy herbage where a snake may be having a peaceful nap. All I need to do now is to give the area one more, extremely thorough dig (the odds are about 50/50 that I'll get around to it).
This week I am:
- Pruning back the winter-blooming salvias, removing vetch and hauling out kikuyu runners.
- Admiring the white Florentine iris, grown commercially for their scented rhizomes that are the source of gloriously fragrant orris root - its scent only develops when the rhizome dries and is powdered. I love them for their beauty and stubborn survival no matter what the weather.
- Resisting the temptation to buy advanced tomato plants, at least for another week or two. Wait till daytime temperatures are above 20 degrees for three days in a row before planting out the lettuce, silverbeet, tomatoes et al.
- Feeding the chooks gone-to-seed lettuce, but not too much gone-to-seed cabbage or their eggs will taste slightly sulphurous.
- Buying the new cultivar of the native raspberry, this one thornless and advertised as easy to train on trellis, as well as giving prolific and delicious fruit. I'm tempted to believe the hype, as the native raspberries you find in the bush or on road verges locally are invariably a delight, one mostly ignored because the plants look insignificant, and few people know what can be found foraging on any roadside that isn't grazed by cattle or herbicided every year.
- Delighting in the time of year when bare trees suddenly turn green overnight, or yet another covers itself with blossom.
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