Creeping Charley is a weed, also know as ground ivy. When mature, it forms masses of thin vines (stolons), loosely rooted to the ground. My “puller” is a bow rake paired with a paint roller. It’s crude, but this allowed me to pull masses of Creeping Charlie out of a garden bed that I was preparing, without having to stoop over and pull it by hand. Details are below.
This post is a collection of a few things that are happening in my garden, at present.
1 Bee Hotels: No Vacancy.
I tossed the cheap Home Depot bee hotel I used last year. It was cute, but a bad design from several standpoints. Mainly the bee nesting tubes were too short (should be 6″, so they say) and non-replaceable (should provide fresh nesting tubes each year).
Instead, I put together some crude D-I-Y native bee hotels using 6″ bamboo tubes, clay/mud (to seal the back end, if needed), and either garden twine (left) or wire ties (right) to bundle the tubes up.
These have been a hit with the native bees. Above, every tube that is sealed with mud is a tube that the bees have used to lay eggs. The hotel on the left is fully occupied, the ones on the right are just a few tubes away from it. I may even feel the need to make up a couple more bee hotels, just to see if they, too, will get used.
Weirdly, the bees exhibited a strong preference for the “all natural” bee hotel consisting of bamboo, mud, and jute twine. That one filled up much faster than the seemingly similar bee hotels bound with plastic wire ties. I don’t know if that’s coincidence, but I’m going with jute twine for any future bee hotels.
I think success here is due to:
- tubes that are the right length (~6″)
- tubes cut green to avoid rough edges (Post G23-015)
- tubes the right diameter, with variation to accommodate different species of bees (reference)
- location near mud (these are over my water barrels)
- location in a weather-sheltered spot that gets morning light but no afternoon sun.
- luck.
Below, there are the hotels in the construction phase (Post G24-004).
These bee hotels are disposable. This makes it easy to do the right thing, which is to give the bees fresh new nesting tubes each year. I’m going to leave these hotels as-is all winter (Post G24-004), then put them in an “emergence box” in the spring. At that time, I’ll replace them with new ones.
Meanwhile, I’ve been cutting up the green bamboo that inevitably appears in my yard this time of year, for next year’s tubes. Get it green enough, and you can cut nice smooth bee nesting tubes with sharp garden secateurs.
2 Are skip laurels allelopathic?
That’s a big YES, according to the Pokeweed family currently residing at the back of my suburban lot. (And according to experts.)
I cut these bushes back last year, hoping to plant something useful under them. This year, as was just about to put in some plants there, I noted that the area under the skip (Schip) laurels was still empty, almost a year after they were cut back. I also noted that my carefully-curated pokeweed stopped right at the skip laurel.
Two minutes on the internet confirmed that skip laurels (and cherry laurels in general) are strongly alleopathic. That is, they generate chemicals that discourage other plants from growing under them.
Anything strong enough to keep out pokeweed has a pretty good chance of killing anything I’d care to plant there. So I put my new plants elsewhere.
3 Creeping Charlie puller
Last year, I had a nice annual flower bed in my back garden. That’s it, above.
To get that nice stand of annuals last year, first solarized the bed all winter, to kill all the weeds. I only took the plastic off the flower bed when I planted those flower seeds.
At that point, it was Flowers 1, Weeds 0. Starting from the same stage of development (seeds), the flowers grew fast enough that they won out over the weed seeds that remained in the soil.
This year, by contrast, I didn’t sterilize the soil first. Instead,I left those flower stalks up all winter, as being good for the bugs. (Though I may rethink that.) This spring, I simply cut down any standing flower stalks, sowed flower seeds, watered/covered, and waited.
And what I got was Weeds 1, Flowers 0. The weeds are taking over the plot before my main tranche of flower seeds (again, zinnias and marigolds) could germinate. Weeds, to the point where they are going to shade out my flower seeds when they sprout.
The worst weed, in that regard, is Creeping Charlie, a.k.a., ground ivy. This stuff is all over my yard, but in particular, there’s enough of it, thick enough, that I think it’s going to smother any flower seeds below.
I needed a quick way to rip out around 100 square feet of the stuff. It comes up easily, but I didn’t look forward to stooping over gathering handfuls of it. Using a garden rake (bow rake) was like pulling a comb through hair — the Creeping Charlie stolons simply passed through the tines of the bow rake.
I ended up using a paint roller (on a long handle) along with the bow rake, to “grab onto” the Creeping Charlie stolons. Here’s the setup, turned upside-down (rake teeth facing up). It’s just a long-handled paint roller tool (black/steel/yellow), and a bow rake/garden rake (blue)
I used a bow rake to grab the Creeping Charlie, and a paint roller to keep it pinned to the rake as I ripped it up. Tuck the tines of the rake under a bunch, press down with the paint roller, hold both tool handles with both hands, and rip up a swath of Creeping Charlie. The paint roller keeps the Creeping Charlie vines (stolons) from slipping through the rake tines. Pull back on the paint roller and shake to release the plant material.
Above is a section of garden bed just as I was starting out (top), covered in mature Creeping Charlie, and then the same area when I was done with it for the day (bottom), with a lot more bare dirt showing.
Without bending over. That’s the key here. Sure, I could have ripped all that out by hand. But I could do it this way without bending over. And largely leaving smaller seedlings in place.
This doesn’t work worth a damn on tough, well-rooted weeds. Doesn’t really work well on young Creeping Charlie plants. And the Creeping Charlie will be back, for sure. But it clears out a large area of mature Creeping Charlie in short order, without having to bend over and pull it out by hand.
But with this, and a quick mowing, and my flower seeds at least have a fighting chance. I just needed to even up the odds a bit, meaning prevent Charlie from shading out my soon-to-be sprouting zinnia seeds.
Toward a well-regulated garden
I started gardening in earnest during the pandemic. So this makes my fifth spring.
Over that time, pretty much everything about my back-yard vegetable garden has changed. I’ve changed the location of the raised beds. I’ve changed the location of the mulch pile. I’ve changed what I grow, and how I grow it.
The upshot is that the vegetable garden I’m growing this year is almost completely different from the one I started during the pandemic. Different location, different foods, different varieties.
I note that as this has evolved, my garden has gotten a lot … neater, for want of a better term. Planned, maybe? I think I’m homing in on having a well-regulated garden. It’s not really rocket science, but much of my learning has been at the school of hard knocks.
Find the sun. If nothing else, stand outside at solar noon (1 PM daylight savings time) and try to spot the sunniest locations. All other things equal, that’s where you want to grow your plants. My failure to do that, at the outset, meant having to move my raised beds (after they were already filled with dirt), which is just about exactly as stupid as it sounds.
Select your plants well. For me, this includes growing plants that I like to eat, that grow reasonably well here without a lot of pesticides or labor, and that are productive. The big shocker to me was variation in productivity across varieties of the same plant.
Deer defenses are key, in the ‘burbs. After trying a bunch of things, I’ve settled on a combination of motion-activated sprinklers and a portable electric fence. The electric fence looks like hell, but my local deer seem to respect it. So it stays up. Anything outside the perimeter of the fence is fair game for the deer to eat.
Irrigation is easy on a flat plot, even with water barrels. Last year I found that 1/2″ drip line worked just fine with my water barrels, albeit slowly. This year, I’m expanding that with 1/2″ drip tape, which is a lot more flexible.
Drip tape works with water barrels, with some caveats. First, at low pressure (from a water barrel), it has a higher flow rate than drip line, so I need to keep the “tape” sections of my surface irrigation separate from the “line” sections. (Otherwise, if I just turn on all the irrigation at once, the drip tape sections will get much more water than the drip line sections.) In addition, with water barrels, the flow rate in drip tape falls off rapidly. The drip rate was cut in half, over a level distance of 60 feet. This means I have to keep runs of drip tape down to 30 feet or so, fed by the half-inch line that forms the backbone of my irrigation.
The other downside is that 1/2″ drip tape uses a completely different set of fittings from 1/2″ drip line. I have to store these separately to keep from getting the two different sets of fittings mixed up.
Succession planting. I started out thinking that you planted stuff in the spring. That’s only partially true. Some plants like cool weather, others can’t stand it. Conversely, some like it hot, others don’t. So, you plant so as to try to keep everybody happy. Peas and potatoes go in on St. Patrick’s day. A month or two from now, they they are done, I’ll put in beans, mustard, and similar quick cropping plants.
Plants that don’t like cool weather may survive if planted after first frost, but they won’t thrive. So there’s almost no point to planting the heat-loving plants early in the spring. They’ll just sit there. Plant something that likes the cool weather, and that will be harvestable in time for re-planting with a heat-loving crop.
You gotta weed. To me, weeding was always the last thing I chose to do in my garden. As a result, I tended to have a weedy garden. Which, I have come to note, is not what you see from successful gardeners on YouTube.
By contrast, my wife appears to view weeding as a form of outdoor recreation. She has been known to utter such strange sentences as: “What a lovely day, I think I’ll do some weeding”.
As a weeding-averse person, I am now trying to cultivate my wife’s attitude toward it, with limited success. But it has to get done. You have to do it, sooner or later. And sooner beats later by a longshot.
