We’ve been fighting a constant battle with chicory, which I unwisely introduced to my little meadow area twenty-five years ago, when someone offered me a plant. With its blue flowers, it’s attractive but invasive. Its white runners, some threadlike, others tough and chunky, are continually making their way from their stronghold in the meadow, under the timber edging and into the veg bed.
The chicory soon spreads to any bare patches in the meadow, swamping most of the wild flowers that I attempt to introduce, such as bird’s-foot trefoil. It loves the damp, rich, disturbed soil at the bottom end of our garden.
I’ve decided that after years of struggling to keep it under control, I’m going to abandon my dream of creating a traditional wild flower meadow and go for a more managed version, a supercharged meadow. It worked well when I tried a similar approach in the raised bed behind the pond; in place of the clumps of perennials, which were regularly getting infiltrated by coltsfoot and other weeds, I cleared the whole bed then put in a variety of flowers which were recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society as Plants for Pollinators (see link below for a useful list).
Fiskars Digging Spade
Unlike the raised veg beds, the meadow has had very little cultivation so it’s going to need some heavy digging. My regular spade, which my dad bought for us when we started gardening, is a smaller border spade, with a small head for getting in between plants but with a proportionately short handle, which means that, as I’m 6 ft 4 inches tall, I’m doing too much bending as I dig.
So I’ve just bought a Fiskars Xact Digging Spade, with a lightweight extra long ‘soft grip’ ergonomic ‘Fiber Comp’ handle and a pointed boron steel head, which means that if I hit a stone while digging, I shouldn’t get such a jarring shock as I might with the straight-ended border spade.
I’ll let you know how I get on when I start digging the meadow turf.
Link
Plants for Pollinators, recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society