Why I don't reach for the weedkiller

Someone asked me last week why I was on my knees pulling bittercress out of a border when a bottle from the garden centre would have done it in ten minutes. It's a fair question, and the answer isn't really about chemicals.

It's that spraying answers the wrong question.

Weeds are a symptom

A weed is a plant that's very good at colonising bare, disturbed ground. If a patch of your garden grows weeds every single year, the thing that patch is telling you is that it's bare, or compacted, or too shaded for what you planted there.

Kill this year's weeds and next year's arrive into exactly the same conditions. Cover the ground — with mulch, with planting, with anything — and the problem gets smaller every season instead of resetting.

What I actually do instead

• Hand weed while they're small. Ten minutes now beats an hour in July.
• Mulch anything bare, two or three inches deep. Compost, bark, leafmould.
• Plant closer together, so there's less open ground for anything to land on.
• Fix the underlying thing — usually compaction, sometimes shade.

When I would use something

I'm not absolutist. Japanese knotweed is a different conversation, and so is an infestation that's about to cost someone a mature hedge. In those cases I'll set out the options honestly, including the ones I'd rather avoid, and you decide.

What I won't do is make a spray the first answer to an ordinary garden problem.