HOW TO GO SPRAY-FREE
LIKE most gardeners, I face a stark weedfighting choice, writes JOHN NAISH. Either run my allotment like a back-breaking version of The Good Life or apparently risk turning it into a toxic eden by liberally spraying scarysounding chemicals.
Studies show that it may take between a year and 16 months for glyphosate to leave your soil completely.
As a glutton for punishment and healthy food, I choose the drudgery of hand-to-hand combat. The decision is inspired by a healthy dose of hypochondria informed by decades in medical journalism.
So I was surprised to hear from a friend that the plotholders on her allotments are locked in debate about using glyphosate weedkillers on their crops.
Is there still an argument? I won’t even use chemicals on the garden, for the sake of the pooch and kids.
Horticultural experts advise the following for a neglected allotment plot: ‘Treating with glyphosate-based weedkiller will bring the ground into a more workable condition.’
It’s important to stress there is no cast-iron evidence of risk, but garnishing your food with
chemicals surely defeats the object of home-growing.
In any event, in my hippie home town you’ll get run off the plot for using glyphosate — literally.
Health activists have been campaigning since 2015 to rid the place of weedkiller chemicals. Other places around Ireland and Britain are doing the same.
Instead we mostly work the worthy way.
The easy thing is to put tarpaulins over unused weeded beds and keep everything covered all winter. Cruel darkness kills everything bar bindweed and dandelions.
The rest is all hard work. Surrounding your crops with mulch — bark or grass clippings — likewise smothers weeds, although it does seem to import weeds of its own.
Digging beds over annually helps to keep the blighters at bay. Obliterating young weeds with the sweep of a hoe is fun, until you chop through one of the plants you’re trying to protect. Pesticides can be shunned, too. I kill blackfly with very dilute eco washing-up liquid. I tell the kids that it makes them slip off plants. In fact it suffocates them. You do have to repeat the operation every few days, though.
As for slugs, neighbour Pete seeds his ground with tiny nematode worms in spring — some 300,000 of them for every square metre of soil.
The theory is that the worms infect the slugs lethally. But every spring a gastropod army marauds from my plot to his, delighted by the lack of crowds.
Organic slug pellets may work, but my local super-slugs scoff at the things and leave a thank-you note for the amusebouches. I just stamp on the critters. It’s brutal but ecologically sound.
You’re fighting a clean fight, but you have to realise that it’s a losing battle. And even if the crops do get laid waste by weed and worm, I reckon I’m still up on the deal — I hate the gym but I can spend hours on a shovel-wielding workout in the fresh air, any time of year.