Featuring new, up-to-date control methods, this is a weed identification guide and problem solver in one book. Discover the potential benefits and uses of many common weeds - as fertilisers and companion plants. Presented alphabetically for easy reference with clear colour pictures for positive identification.
Companion planting has a long history of use by gardeners, but the explanation of why it works has been filled with folklore and conjecture. Plant Partners delivers a research-based rationale for this ever-popular growing technique, offering dozens of ways you can use scientifically tested plant partnerships to benefit your whole garden. Through an enhanced understanding of how plants interact with and influence each other, this guide suggests specific plant combinations that improve soil health and weed control, decrease pest damage, and increase biodiversity, resulting in real and measurable impacts in the garden.
Gardeners find weeds baffling and daunting. Here at last comes a practical guide which explains how weeds work and how best to deal with them. Whenever he is gardening William Edmonds sees Charles Darwin as his mentor. Darwin was intrigued by the nature of variation in plants and how this related to which plants thrived and survived. From his minute observations we can understand how weeds can propagate and take over a garden. Informed by Darwin’s insights, and by over thirty years of gardening experience, William Edmonds describes and illustrates one hundred significant garden weeds, arranged in the order in which they have evolved. For each there is a What To Do and a further chapter sets out the pros and cons of twenty tried and tested approaches to weeding. Learning to recognise, understand and deal with each weed will take you well on the way to coping in a relaxed – even enjoyable – tussle with these devilish despoilers. Weeds, Weeding (& Darwin) is an enlightening guidebook for every gardener.
Here, at last, is a lavishly illustrated manual for ready identification of 299 common and economically important weeds in the region south to Virginia, north to Maine and southern Canada, and west to Wisconsin. Based on vegetative rather than floral characteristics, this practical guide gives anyone who works with plants the ability to identify weeds before they flower. - A dichotomous key to all the species described in the book is designed to narrow the choices to a few possible species. Identification can then be confirmed by reading the descriptions of the species and comparing a specimen with the drawings and photographs.- A fold-out grass identification table provides diagnostic information for weedy grasses in an easy-to-use tabular key.- Specimens with unusual vegetative characteristics, such as thorns, square stems, whorled leaves, or milky sap, can be rapidly identified using the shortcut identification table. The first comprehensive weed identification manual available for the Northeast, this book will facilitate appropriate weed management strategy in any horticultural or agronomic cropping system and will also serve home gardeners and landscape managers, as well as pest management specialists and allergists.
What is a weed? The dictionary will tell you it is simply a plant growing out of place. In The Wondrous World of Weeds you will discover that there are plants all around us with culinary and holistic potential. They are also good companions in the garden for vegetables, fruit trees, and flowers, and can tell you about the quality of your soil and any imbalances that are present. This comprehensive and practical guide features more than 300 stunning, close up-images to help with the identification of weeds as well as a full description, list of common names, environmental impact, uses and medicinal value for each plant. It covers a full range of weeds from those annoying plants that pop up in the garden to majestic trees.