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Winding my memory back. My mother was at wits end with the kikuyu that came in from a neighbours yard and had taken over her yard. So I asked her to collect broadsheet newspapers. When she had enough we lay them down about four sheets thick overlapped and spread fresh grape marc approx six inches thick on top of the paper. Left it sit for a few weeks then just started gardening in it. Never saw the kikuyu again, grew a bountiful vegetable garden and the fruit trees came back to life. Rejuvenated mum as well.
Grape marc is the product resulting after the winery is through with the bunches skins and seeds and the distilley has used them to get the brandy. Steam sterilized, none of the grape seeds grow. Wild on the pH scale the composting marc goes through swings from highly acid to highly alkaline until it eventually settles at neutral.
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Interesting. But I don't have grape marc available. Unfortunately, our weeds grew through the cardboard and wood chips we put down last year......
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Yeah. Cardboard and wood chips. So, what are your weeds? bamboo?
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There are lots of plants called wiregrass. I'm going to have to look up creeping charlie but dandelions are exactly what you need to fix your soil problems so I would not class them as weeds.
DANDELIONS are the BEST INDICATORS of...
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(07-13-2022, 09:32 AM)Dreamin Wrote: https://extension.umd.edu/resource/bermu...-wiregrass
Argh! Why do people move plants around the globe? I won't allow plants like couch and kikuyu in my yard. That wiregrass/Bermuda grass would be yet another headache for me. Digging it out of compacted clay would be a nightmare.
The creeping charlie looks like a difficult plant to eradicate.
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wiregrass, dandelion, creeping charlie
ALL of these have taken over my yard. My daughter does not want me to spray any chemicals in her garden.... yet the ONLY way to rid ones yard of any of these is to kill everything for a year... spray an herbicide over and over .....and that's what we don't want to do....
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Yeah. There's already way too much chemical residual build up in the system.
One of our errors in land management is expecting to be able to change things overnight. Spraying/ploughing are detrimental to soil health. Yet we do these things in order to effect a change more quickly.
What usually makes an introduced species a pest, is lack of predatory competition for such species. In each evolved ecosystem, a balance is in effect. Disrupt this ecological balance and logically the result is mayhem and chaos.
Happiness simply is.
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