What’s your favourite weed?

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Gardening involves weeding. Even creating a ‘wildflower garden’ still involves a certain amount of weeding if you don’t want the more thuggish plants to take over. I try to avoid it as much as possible by filling the flower beds with plants I do want and adding lots of mulch so there’s little bare soil available for weeds to get started. In the vegetable garden though it’s pretty much unavoidable that there will be some bare earth while young seedlings just get going. As someone put it, weeding gives you a God-like ability to decide who will live and who will die. And a weed is just a plant in an undesirable place - grass in the flowerbeds for example. I confess I feel bad as I pull out wild flowers from the vegetable patch. Often I let them grow for a while until I really need the space for something edible. My favourite weed has to be Speedwell. It certainly lives up to its name, getting going early in spring and growing fast. It also seeds all over the place and would certainly take over everywhere if allowed. But I do love its cheery blue flowers - and as an added bonus it’s one of the easiest plants to pull up! So I can let it have its time in the sun, admire the flowers, then weed it out and compost it, knowing that there will still be plenty of seeds there ready to repeat the process! Do you have a favourite weed that you secretly admire? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.