To Kill A Buddleia

 

 

I wrote recently about formative pruning of Buddleia, and I used the phrase “...there is practically nothing you can do to kill them!”

I've had a couple of humorous messages from Patrons (waves cheerfully “Hi, guys!” ) on this subject, and one plaintive plea asking if there is a way to kill off one that you absolutely don't want.

Funnily enough, I do have an example: in one of “my” gardens, I am regularly asked to cut down a Buddleia which is sneakily growing in the piece of neglected garden up behind the garage, where it is casting shade on the solar panels. It's a self-set plant - well, no-one would deliberately plant something between their solar panels and the sun, now would they? - and it was flourishing, absolutely flourishing, the wretch: so every few weeks I'd be asked to chop it down....

 

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Homing Snails

 

Just the other day, someone asked me if it was true that if you throw snails out of your back garden, they will come back.

To some extent, it depends on where you throw them: if you live next to a busy 4-lane dual carriageway, then no, they almost definitely won't come back.

If you live next door to someone you don't like very much, and they catch you throwing snails over the fence, they might return to you at high velocity.

But if you just have some open land next to your garden, or a path, perhaps, or some common land, then - brace yourselves - yes. They will come back.

Here is a little anecdote from my own garden.....

 

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Bramble removal: how to make it easier on yourself

 

"Hire someone else to do it!" (*laughs uproariously*)

OK, seriously: it's the first week of January, the middle of winter, it's been below freezing for most of the past week, I don't return to work for another week ("Yay!").

(OK, if you are reading this and saying "Hey! It's mid February!!" then don't forget that if you want to get the articles as soon as they come out, you will need to hop over to Patreon...)

So now is the time to look through some partly-written articles and share them with you - having finished them, obviously - so you'll excuse this one for not being seasonally relevant, although now is a good time to think about these things, and maybe to plan for getting out there and tackling the Beastly Brambles, just as soon as it gets a bit milder, and before they start growing again!

 Here's one of my Trainees, manfully working on a large bramble (or Blackberry, if you prefer, it's the same thing) which was fiendishly intertwined with the chicken wire around the garden owner's tennis court:

 ... while I did something else... no, I'm joking, I was working right alongside her, honest. I would never abandon a Trainee to do a horrible job all by themselves.

Seriously, though, I'm always being asked how to get rid of brambles - I've written about it any number of times, on this blog - just type the word brambles into the Search box, top left of the screen there, to see a selection of articles.

And one of those articles prompted a follow-up questions, which was......

 

 

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