The garlic I planted is doing well and growing fast.
My broad beans and experimental out-of-season peas have all sprouted beautifully.
But, but, but... so have the sour sobs. AARGH!
The problem with sour sobs, my most-disliked garden weed, is that they make a thick, suffocating carpet, swamping any other poor green things that happen to be trying to eke out a living in the vicinity.
These beastlies have gone mad in MIL's vegetable patch, and now they have turned up en masse in my 'new' garden beds, the ones that were previously lawn. Now, having been lawn last year, I don't remember there being so many. I guess the grass kept them down. But now, freed from their constraints, the bulbs that have clearly been lurking in the soil have gone, 'whoopee! Let's make a run for it! Our time is here!'
One of the other problems with sour sobs is that they are almost impossible to get rid of, propagating by little bulbs in the soil that hardly ever come up when you pull the plant, no matter how careful you are. Apparently, if you pull and pull and pull the plants, over some half dozen years you will deplete the bulbs' energy reserves sufficiently and get rid of them that way. You can also poison them - best done when the plant is flowering - but I see this as a last resort only to be employed when in dire straights.
What is the solution? I cannot let them run riot in my garden; I will never be rid of them. So I am trying something out in both my and MIL's garden. I am sort-of 'hoeing' them down, scraping them from the soil and hacking them into the ground whenever they appear. I will let you know how this goes. I wonder how many times I'll have to do it over the season?
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