trying to love capeweed

Capeweed colonises poor and disturbed ground, so it hardly needs saying, it flourishes here. Unfortunately, efforts to improve soil and watering only seem to speed it along! I may even have inadvertently encouraged it in the orchard by using sheep manure as part of compost to build up beds, as it likes soil rich in nitrates, as often found round sheep pens. 

Plants are tough to pull, and ruthless re-rooters if left on the surface or not fully removed, and harbour slugs and some caterpillers. And disturbing soil by pulling them often only encourages more to germinate.

But perhaps it's not all bad. Working round this area, the soil is moister and crumblier than elsewhere, and even offers up the occasional worm. The extensive roots are classic soil-breakers, and there's always the chance that capeweed accumulates minerals - cadmium and zinc have shown up in some tests. And as a winter-growing herb, much of this action is while fruit trees are dormant. All in the context of such appalling soil that anything that adds life and/or air and/or organic matter is welcomed.

And there's an added bonus in that bees can use the nectar and, particularly, pollen at a time when little else is available, and the leaves might be a useful addition to compost or for my planned worm farm.

So this one looks like a weed to be controlled and used, rather than necessarily eradicated.

In preparing orchard beds for new fruit trees, and developing and building up beds around fruit trees recently planted, a few techniques are being tried, while capeweed between these beds is being left largely as is - at least for now - so leaves might be cut for wormfarm or compost if needed and coming flowers can feed bees.

Where other green manure plants (here, broad beans) have been planted between planned fruit trees, capeweed has been selectively removed only from closest to the beans, to remove a little competition and see if beans will then grow well, side by side.

Where growing alongside beds, have pulled those closest to planting mounds and edges of beds and heaped them carefully on beds, hoping plants, at best, die off to provide green mulch before they can take root, or at worst are easier to manage as more work is done on these beds. Pulling these ones conveniently loosens soil and makes it a bit easier to redig edges, including channeling along upper edge.

In a later session, I tried this basic technique but with a decent spread of newspaper on beds first, to slow rerooting. Both pulled plants and tyres were used to weight down paper. Tyres should provide some protection from animals (there had already been signs of bark-gnawing) and a small heatbank and water reservoir.

Along fence at rear, weeds were pulled and heaped. Here, bed is being widened , and weeds are heaped along it to become a composting layer. (This bed has already been enriched with a Bukashi bin of compost dug in between each post at intended planting spots.) Something similar will be done on other stretches of bed, including between surviving feijoas where additional hedging plants are to be interspersed.

Making gradual progress covering this fenceline bed with a decent newspaper layer to help prevent weeds resprouting by shutting out light. Newspaper is being held down by turning over soil at sides of the bed. This digging helps deepen the channel along higher edge of bed, while widening the bed a little. A layer of mushroom compost will be added next. Not plants have been chosen/ordered yet for this bed, but when ready to plant, holes will be dug through the newspaper at relevant points.

DECEMBER UPDATE

Here the contrast can be seen between beds where newspaper was used (left) and a stretch with weeds regrowing where it wasn't (right). Mind you, both patches are relatively clean.