Perennial Weeds

 Weeds in the car park.

Wheelie bins full of weeds have been left in the car park at our allotment.   While it is not good allotment  practise to leave weeds for someone else to deal with it does present an interesting composting challenge.

  Perennial weeds  can be composted using a hot composting system, or pre-treated to kill them by drying, drowning in a  bin  or being kept in the dark for a couple of years. With so many weeds left at one time and as most seem to have a significant amount of topsoil attached to their roots, most of these methods are impracticable in the space we have so I am going to use light exclusion by building  a weed mound where the weeds will be heaped in a mound covered with black plastic and left for a year, or two if they contain significant amounts of couch grass. If once the wheelie bins are emptied, they are found to contain weed infested turves these will be stacked grass side to grass side. The idea is to produce good quality loam saving  all the topsoil someone had intended to just throw away

To be continued….