Bank holiday Sunday activity: Know your weeds!

There have been some lovely articles about recently on taking a look at weeds growing in pavement cracks and appreciating them- for their appearance, and the help they give to our environment. We've even got a very cute stunted white valerian growing in a stopcock cover in our road! It's been really lovely to realise just how many species there are springing up as the council hasn't poisoned the pavements (yet?) this year. Hopefully this is part of their new verge strategies as they are trying to make the city more biodiverse.

As may have been a bit obvious from other posts, we're spending a lot of time taking weeds out of our vegetable plots and mulching them from other specific growing areas- but we do think plants growing all over the place are brilliant, as a general rule- just not bindweed in with the courgettes!

The RHS has some good resources on weed identification, though they do have a bit of a focus on killing the weeds too (which rather defeats the point of pavement weed identification!)

There's also a nice chart of some plants from Polli:Nation (it's the pollination chart pdf available via the link) and some ideas for recording and sharing photos of weeds from More than Weeds. While you're not actually allowed to chalk plant names next to the plants in this country it does seem a really lovely idea- maybe if we wore balaclavas while doing it nobody would notice?