Learn How To Keep Weeds Under Control!
June feels like the time each year when the weeds get away from gardeners. The long warm days and the fact that there is usually still ample moisture means the vegetables, and the weeds grow fast. And as the sun gets hotter it gets less and less exciting to be out in the garden for many hours pulling weeds. Below, learn some best practices to keep weeds under control and save you hours of hand pulling weeds including short video clips from our Weeding 101 video.
Why Weed
It’s important to keep weeds from getting out of hand in your garden for a few reasons. One, weeds compete with your vegetables for water, especially as we go into the hotter drier period of summer. Two, especially when your plants are small, weeds often grow faster than your vegetables, so if you are not weeding regularly the weeds can grow bigger than your plants and shade them. This can make it hard for you to find them, as well as keep an eye out for pests and disease, and ultimately harvest.
Weed Prevention
The first thing to consider is weed prevention. (Watch the video clip on this here.) Covering the soil to exclude light from hitting the soil surface prevents many weeds from growing. You can do this with a material like cardboard or burlap, or with dead plant materials (mulch). Some good mulches for the vegetable garden are fall leaves, straw, dried grass clippings, and leaf mould.
To use these weed prevention techniques you first must make sure there are no weeds. If you just throw some mulch onto weeds most of them will just grow right through. You need to completely and thoroughly remove all weeds from your space and then place the mulch or burlap on top. Mulch also needs to be thick, at least 3 inches deep, so no light is reaching the soil. If you have some harder to kill perennial weeds, cardboard can be good to place over them once you have removed as much as you can. Cardboard will prevent things from pushing through for a least a month or two which can help slow those down.
Weeding
The most important rule of weeding to make your life easier is to do it often. If you weed often it can go very quickly If you wait a month, it is more work than 4 weekly weedings combined. There are many great tools for this! (Watch the video clip on this here.)
All weeding tools are a blade on a stick of some kind. As is the case with all bladed tools they work better and are less strenuous for you if you sharpen them. Hoes and other weeding tools rarely come sharp so unfortunately you will need to do that. (Watch the video clip on this here.) When the tool is sharp it cuts through the soil easier and makes weeding much faster. Also if you weed often, when the weeds are small, you are using these tools to scrape or almost sweep the soil surface as opposed to having to chop or dig out weeds. This is much faster and easier.
After you use your garden tool, look around and pull out the weeds you missed by hand. There will always be weeds growing right up against your plant or somewhere else in your bed where you can’t quite get it with a hoe so you will need to hand weed it. But with practice this is a very small percentage of weeds that you will need to hand weed.
Summary
So that’s it. Weed large areas with sharpened weeding tools. If you are able to kill all of your weeds and don’t have things like bindweed or bermuda grass that creep back in then after it is totally weeded you can mulch the area. If you cannot mulch the area then make sure to do a quick weed once a week followed by handweeding of anything the tools miss and you will have a productive weed free garden this summer.