Tag: organic weed control

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Weeds!

As I look back over my years of writing this blog, and when I think of September or October in the garden, I see that I faced the same problem every year:  out of control weeds.  Somehow the oppressive heat of August makes me reluctant to give the garden enough attention and the weeds get ahead of me.  For two Augusts,  I was in the sickly, exhausted stages of early pregnancy, and in two more Augusts I had infants that needed more care than the garden.  And in one more August I was 30 weeks pregnant, at age 40, and I could barely take care of my other two children and get dinner on the table, much less weed the garden.  Life happens to us sometimes.   All those years of weeds going to seed placed hundreds of thousands of seeds in the garden soil.

Oh, those weeds!

This past August, I moved away from my garden, and I was taking care of a new garden that I hope to keep free of weeds through some better strategies (more on that later).  The weeds reproduced with abandon in my old garden.

Our house is on the market still, and I went to the garden to try to gain some control over the weeds to help out the future homeowners.  They might bulldoze the entire garden, established asparagus plants and blackberries included, but I don’t want to think about that.  I will try to control the weeds and imagine them having a lovely garden in this space, thanking the person who produced this beautiful nutrient-rich soil for them, even if it is weedy.  In any case, the garden looks pretty frightening in its current state and cannot be a selling point.

If your garden looks like the picture above, it’s time for some weed triage.  If I had the time, I would go around and hand-pull as many of the crabgrass plants that are going to seed as I could.  I would place them in a garbage bag and dispose of them either in the trash or in a place so deeply shaded in the woods that the seeds couldn’t germinate.  I would use the bag, or a solid container, to keep those seeds from spreading any more.

After I pulled some weeds, I laid down tarps over the weeds.  While we still own the home, I will move the tarps around to other sections of the garden to kill the weeds.  Most weeds die within a week.  Hurricane Michael is on his way to us, so I made sure to weight down the edges of the tarps with extra stones.

If you have a similar disaster of weeds in your garden, I will offer some suggestions to help eliminate the weeds for next year.

  • Move the tarps weekly, or when the weeds underneath have turned a sickly yellow-brown.  If some green remains, they aren’t dead.
  • Rake aside and remove the dead weeds to a place outside the garden.
  • Encourage the next generation of weed seeds to germinate by lightly disturbing the surface of the soil with a landscape rake.
  • If rain is not expected, water the soil.
  • Wait for the weeds to germinate, and place tarps over those areas again to kill the weeds, flame weed, or lightly hoe the space.
  • Repeat this process again and again, and you will have reduced the weed seed bank significantly.
  • Do not till or disturb the soil below the surface.  If you need to lay off rows or to construct beds, do this and then water the soil, wait for germination, and lay the tarps on the area again to kill the weeds.
  • I use 6mil or thicker black plastic, or regular tarps that are UV stabilized.  If I put the tarps and plastic away when I am not using them, they will last many years.  Do not use think plastic or landscape fabric; it decomposes within a few months.

 

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Weeds, weeds, weeds!

The weeds have gotten ahead of me this summer.  We have been busy with traveling and taking my children to camps, and keeping up with the toddler precludes vanishing to the garden for hours.  He does enjoy playing in the garden and my older children and husband do watch him for me occasionally.

The main problem (and blessing) I’ve had this summer has been the rain.  I think I am in something of a microclimate because the weather data I can find from the airport that’s about 45 minutes away from here indicates that our rainfall is slightly below normal.  All I can say is that our lawn is a beautiful, soft, swath of green that hasn’t been watered at all this year, and the crabgrass is two feet tall in places inside the garden.  The tomatoes and okra did poorly, and mildew has been a problem on the beans.

Here is the partially weeded asparagus bed.

A close-up of unweeded portion of the back of the bed.

Below is a picture of the asparagus bed after I spent two hours weeding it.  Later in the day, I hoed it lightly and fertilized it.  I’ll put down some straw to mulch the bed after the weeds in the upper layer of the soil have had time to sprout and I have hoed them down.  

Because I do not have time to pull out all the weeds by hand (if I did, I would not have allowed the garden to become so terribly full of weeds), I have used tarps, black plastic, and whatever else I can find to kill the weeds by covering them and preventing them from seeing the sun.  The dead grass on the right has been covered by a tarp; the grass on the left is enjoying summer.

This is my bed of collards.  I set the plants out as transplants after I repeatedly lightly hoed or tilled the soil to kill the weeds in the upper layer of the soil.  Killing weeds that have barely sprouted is easy.  Organic farmers use the stale seed bed method of planting seeds.  To have a “stale” bed, farmers repeatedly shallowly till the surface of the soil, which kills many seedlings while they are tiny and easy to kill.  Depending on the climate and the time of year, farmers also cover the beds to encourage seeds to sprout so they can be killed.

I have no trouble encouraging seeds to sprout, so I go over the bed with my Earthway Wheel Hoe
to kill the weeds that sprout.  This tool is basically a hoe attached to a wheel, and it’s so easy to use that a child, as long as he or she is tall enough to see over the handlebars, could operate it.  You must have relatively rock and weed-free soil, though.  It won’t cut through rocks or heavy weed roots.  It works perfectly to eliminate baby seedlings, though, as long as the soil is dry.  If the soil is moist, or rain is expected, weeds will re-sprout.

I try to run over the beds and pathways with this tool, or with any hoe or weeding implement, on the mornings of days when rain is not expected and the afternoon temperatures will rise into the 90s.  Sometimes I run a rake back over the beds to eliminate re-sprouting of the weeds.

After a pleasant morning’s work in the garden, I removed three or four wheelbarrow loads of weeds and their seeds.  I do not put them into the compost heap because the seeds would probably sprout eventually.  Instead, I put them in this heap in the edge of the woods where the tree canopy and root system deprives the seeds of the water, nutrients, and light they need to survive.

I have now mulched the asparagus bed with straw, which I hope will hold back the weeds until next year.  I should have mulched the bed last fall, but the obligations of children and other things kept me busy.  I also applied some organic fertilizer to the beds rather heavily in hopes of restoring the nutrients sucked off by all this crabgrass.