Satya, from what I’ve seen in your videos, your garden is beautiful and inspiring! I can’t take all the credit for the lushness in mine. Even with less than 5 inches of rain all year, because of the cooler weather I’ve only had to water the mature plants about once a month, I don’t have an irrigation system. The mist and fog provide extra moisture. The plants are efficient at harvesting water from the air. Here’s a Paggi leaf wet from last night’s fog.
Also, my soil is really good now and holds moisture as long as it’s covered. I let all the flowers, which are mostly bulbs, the greens, artichokes, etc die back naturally early summer during our dry season. They come back on their own and seeds sprout when the fall rains start. I have weeds too, I like to think of them as living mulch. Maybe if I had summer rains I would think differently.
Janet
Thank you, Janet!
Our volunteer weeds are taller than the plants we plant:) some of them are edible like callaloo, so we just weed paths for lunch:) but when they're for example in butterfly garden where we don't walk, it's very upsetting because the flowers are totally hidden by them. Some of them overgrow tomato cages, so you get the scale. they help with soil moisture and for the most part look nice and dark green, but sometimes it gets hard to walk in between))) so we try to establish more aggressive, nicer looking low growing ground covers that make weeds miraculously disappear. Has been hard this summer because it was very hot and dry, and our ground covers didn't like that, but weeds did 🤪
[size=78%].[/size] One of the most annoying ones is wild cucumber, it crawls everywhere and covers flowers, trees, bushes and all trellises, drops seed very fast so it's almost a neverending battle, though it also produces edible fruit. It covered a tree completely and a neighbor said, "this tree with yellow flowers has become so beautiful" (the tree it covered doesn't bloom) 😂
Finally were able to eliminate a terroristic torpedo grass, that was a really aggressive grower so it was not possible to incorporate as it would intimidate all plants around it. We heard from farmers that they're ok with torpedo grass, but when you have a meter and a half of real estate it doesn't work this way... every inch is precious. Maybe on the farm we won't care if torpedo grass gets rampant
We use all the weeds and seasonal plant foliage in compost or direct mulch. Millipede activity is such that barely any organic matter is left for the next season, seeds included. We had to bring in an extra pile of soil, and it had fresh wood chips mixed in. Didn't distribute it in time, and after 4-5 months the soil is just "black gold", absolutely no chips left, only millipedes everywhere 😆
