When I started the nursery there was quite an impressive selection of weeds below the old chicken sheds. For many years chicken muck was shovelled out of the ends of the  sheds creating in areas a beautiful tilth covering the Wadhurst clay and then for many years nettles, thistles, bind weed and ground elder were given free reign.  In the picture above left you can see the nettles towering up almost covering the just visible white transit van. The shed on the left is where the café is now.

I set about hacking and strimming everything down and after a very busy spring got rid of all the visible weeds above ground… below ground was a different story.

Above is one of the few photos I have of the site before I started trying to make the nursery, this is looking up the paddock towards the nursery sheds. the cafe is this end of the left shed. The white is an eight foot high transit van dwarfed by nettles and thistles.

I had started the nursery with a friend Dave and we thought naively that; we were young and fit, and we would fight the weeds, and we would win. We chose our weapons; a spade and mower and we started to dig and weed vegetable beds and mowed the paths. Between mowing and weeding we would soon have this tamed.

For two summers, two green gardeners (green as in inexperienced not fingered) battled to stop our veggies getting swamped. The couch grass grew sideways into the beds joined by the white runners of creeping thistle, the stems of which you could follow down feet into the thick yellow clay. The ground elder splintered their brittle roots everywhere as you tried to remove them and the bright yellow perennial nettle roots were over an inch thick and as we dug them out we were unknowingly spreading the seeds of millions of babies across our beds.

We had just started the nursery and could spend all day each day of that first summer tending to the veg patch and growing plants to sell at fairs. We didn’t have customers visiting at that stage, but later on as the business developed the luxury of time to keep on top of it disappeared.

In the picture you can see the vegetable beds when we thought we were winning before the great counter attack of 2007. We surrendered and ran…

My next attempt was to mow them out. After ten years the nettles are in retreat to the fringes, where they are welcome to live out their days for the benefit of the caterpillars and hosts of other insects that are partial to them and the thistles are not the formidable power they once were.

The ground elder, bindweed and couch grass persist though.

Above left, after ten years of mowing I still have a thick matting of couch grass and groundelder roots.