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.
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.