Dandelions
Ever since moving into the house at Ednam, I've been waging a personal vendetta, largely fruitless I have to admit, against the all-pervasive dandelion. My word, but they're a successful plant. I've noticed they have two main seeding stages a year, and they are proving to be very successful around our way, anyway.

Of course, gardening organically means using no nasty poisons against unwelcome visitors, a strategy all the people we've employed over the years to help keep the grass under control have thought quite bonkers. "What that lawn needs is…", "Of course there's only one way of keeping these under control ….", "What you want to get hold of is…" etc etc.

So I've adopted the mostly pointless exercise of taking all the yellow heads off our dandelions when I spot them, and hoping against hope that this will eventually discourage them from showing themselves. Fat chance. Still, they're vaguely under control, in the sense that there is still more grass than dandelions in some areas, and anyway when they're not yellow or seeding they're green aren't they? Looks like grass from a distance.

Of course now I'm on the boat, the front and back garden has two main benefits: Firstly they're changing all the time, both have water features you could only dream about in suburbia, and secondly and most importantly, the gardens are not mine to maintain!

Imagine a fresh garden every morning, and one that changes 20 or 30 times a day. Don't like that shrub? It'll be gone in a minute. That tree looks a bit dangerous? Change it for this one, different breed, different size and in blossom.

Sounds fantastic doesn't it? There's a snag. There's always a snag.

It was about half way through day 2 when I noticed that there seemed to be an awful lot of seeds on the wind. Sometimes it seemed like cruising through, well, semen. And all this seed was coming from dandelion heads. Not just 10s of them like I've got in my garden. Not even from 100s or even 1000s. There are literally millions of yellow heads and seeding dandelion heads along the length of the canals. I've seen fields full of them, big fields at that. Millions of dandelions issuing billions of seeds, and growing everywhere to boot. Halfway up lock gates, in the crevices of the brickwork of tunnel entrances and bridge parapets, everywhere.

The irony is not lost on me, that while I've been trying to keep my pathetic piece of garden dandelion free, and failing so miserably, that the little yellow buggers have been taking over the rest of the country.

So yes, my front and back gardens are constantly changing. However, they still have the same problem, the yellow weed is a tenacious little bugger, and is winning.

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