Kitchen Garden Forum

For anybody who is new to gardening or who wants to identify the various weeds which grow in their gardens or allotments, the following is a useful site:

http://www.dgsgardening.btinternet.co.uk/weedlf.htm

It provides photographs of all the leaves and if you click on the photo it provides another picture with the plant in flower which also helps to identify it, as well advising which are edible and as giving advice on how to kill them.

Dear Primrose, i'm sure that will be a most useful link for begginers and also handy for the more experienced gardener.

There are still some weeds out there in the wild that i'm not sure of their names.

Brilliant site - thanks for flagging that up for us Primrose.

I've just learnt that what i thought was bindweed in my garden is infact Japanese Knotweed - well you learn something new every day!

Hi Primrose,
Quite a good website but identification by leaf is only one way and generally a weed gets into flower before you realise that it is there.
For this reason I recommend a book on wild flowers The Mitchell Beazely pocket guide to Wild Flowers. This book is truly a pocket guide and gives all the wild flowers In UK and Europe. May cost you but well worth it.
JB.

Primrose
Thanks for the link.
Useful, but I confess I think I would like a picture of the young plant in the ground. This year I have something new in the allotment (in amongst the onions, which was wher I grew souds last year), which I do not recognise, so I am looking through the site carefully.

Smurfy - If you have Japanese knotweed you have my sympathies - as far as I am aware it is a notifiable disease and care needs to be taken when disposing of any that you dig up. We had Japanese knotweed on our site a few years ago and the council had to eradicate it.

Stephen - not to be insulting to you but just in case as you may have ruled this out - the weeds aren't 'volunteer' spuds are they?

Hi Gallotments - No insult taken
- No; however I have a few escapees too. It is astonishing, because I could have sworn that I was very thorough!

glallotments wrote:Smurfy - If you have Japanese knotweed you have my sympathies - as far as I am aware it is a notifiable disease and care needs to be taken when disposing of any that you dig up.

I'm going to keep an eye on it as i only looked at a couple of the leaves. I'll wait until it flowers as i think that will be the clincher. It seems to be growing from an overgrown garden somewhere behind myself and my neighbours house and whilst i am managing to keep on top of it and adding it to a bucket of water my neighbour who is in her 90's isn't and it is now growing through her hedge and trees etc.

Stephen wrote:Hi Gallotments - No insult taken
- No; however I have a few escapees too. It is astonishing, because I could have sworn that I was very thorough!

Hi Stephen,
Every year we think we have been thorough but they seem to escape!!
Smurfy
If it is JKW I hope it isn't near your house as it has been known to come through house foundations and up through house floors!!!!