Today I woke to rain and turned over to sleep again for two hours. WooHoo! I love my sleep! I built a day plan on indoor projects, but after lunch it started to clear and dry out. Perfect timing for weeding, so I headed out for a couple of minutes.
I did some minimal deadheading, weeding and pruning along the front corner, kept on going around the corner and into the driveway, headed at the kitchen door, when I stopped dead at the sight of the overwhelming vines choking everything along the back walk. I've got one or two types of morning glory / bind weed vines going there, and unchecked they were rampant. They were outcompeting two big garden thugs - mint (along the house) and butterfly bushes! Now that's tough!
I worked at it assiduously for a couple of hours. I filled a brown compost bag with the vines. I pulled it out of the grass, off the butterfly bushes and from within the mint. I tried to follow the skinny vining stems down to the ground and grasp firmly to get roots, but I really didn't succeed very often. Sometimes I got stem from beneath the surface, but it didn't seem to have any roots attached.
I think there is probably a root the size of me living six feet down under there, sending shoots to the surface wherever it can. I haven't positively ID'd the culprit, but I know there is a weedy species around here that does just that. So probably what I did today is only a stopgap measure. But it was a useful one, in terms of giving the butterfly bush and mint a fighting chance to get going.
I think my next battle with these vines will involve spraying. The trick will be finding something I can spray without killing the other plants - so down near the ground as it re-emerges near the butterfly bush will work. On the other hand, in the mint bed, I might need to let it get taller than the mint and spray the foliage there. At least I will have given the daffodils in the same bed a chance to wither away. I'll get it, my pretty, if its the last thing I do. If worst comes to worst, I can always just nuke the whole mint bed and start over - I don't need a whole bed of mint, anyway.
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