How To Keep Weeds Out Of Your Garden – 5 Easy Ways
Learn how to keep weeds out of your garden without spending all of your time weeding. I actually enjoy weeding the garden, but let’s face it, it’s not fun when the weeds are taking over the whole garden. I’m going to share with you five simple tips to help you control the weeds in your garden without breaking your back or spending all day in the garden.
Five Simple Weed Control Methods
These five methods for keeping weeds out of your garden are by no means an exhaustive list, as there are many different gardening methods out there of course. I use these five methods every year when growing my half-acre market garden as a busy Mom, and they help me keep up with the weeds. I’ve grown my share of very weedy gardens over the years and have learned ways to manage them without having to spend all my time out in the heat of the summer weeding.
There’s an old saying that Mother Nature is very modest, and doesn’t like to leave bare ground exposed, so she covers it with the fastest growing thing she can…weeds. Anytime you leave your soil bare and unattended, it will grow weeds. All soils contain weed seeds, usually thousands per square foot. Past farming practices do affect the amount of weed seeds in the soil. For example, if weeds have been allowed to go to seed for several years, the amount of weed seeds in the soil will be much greater.
With proper weed management habits, you can minimize the amount of new weed seeds that are added to the soil each season. But you can count on bringing some weed seeds up to the top of the soil every time you till or work the soil. Once these seeds are exposed to light, heat and moisture, they will sprout and grow. This is why we have to have a plan for how to handle weeds in our garden before we expose the soil, because if you expose the soil, you’re guaranteed to have weeds.
Tools We Use For Weed Control
Why It’s Important To Keep The Weeds Out Of Your Garden
- Saves all the nutrients in your soil for your garden plants
- Allows your plants to get the full sunlight they need
- Keeps the weeds from multiplying when going to seed
Tip #1 – Cultivation
Cultivating weeds in the garden is the process of using a variety of cultivation tools to remove weeds usually when they are small. Weekly cultivation of your garden works well if it’s a smaller garden. For me, there’s no way I could cultivate my whole half-acre garden once a week, so I try to only cultivate certain crops in my garden that do better with cultivation than the other methods of controlling weeds that I will share with you. Crops that I usually cultivate include carrots, beets, lettuce, and potatoes. The key to cultivation is having the right tools. When I was a kid, we mainly only cultivated with an old-fashioned hoe, which was hard on your back, and really just re-buried the weeds. A garden hoe is, in my opinion, best suited for hilling potatoes.
The Right Cultivation Tools Are Essential
One of my favorite tools for cultivation are a collinear hoe, which works great for killing weeds when they are small or even before you see them. It’s a good idea to cultivate the soil with a collinear hoe once a week, even if you can’t see any weeds. This way you will kill the small hair-like weed sprouts that are under the soil before they emerge from the soil. Using a collinear hoe is easy on your back and is an enjoyable process. You can cover a lot of ground quickly using a collinear hoe and get close to plants, which reduces the amount of hand weeding needed.
The other tool I like to use for cultivation is a stirrup hoe. This works great in walkways and places where the weeds are larger. It easily cuts off the weeds underground and pulls up any weeds that are small. You can also get a wheel hoe, which is just a stirrup hoe that comes on one or two wheels for support, making it easier to use as you push it along. For home gardeners, a stirrup hoe does a great job. For a larger garden a wheel hoe is a good investment.
There are many more cultivation tools out there, but I have found that a collinear hoe and a stirrup hoe are sufficient for all the cultivation that needs done in my garden.
Tip #2 – Flame Weeding
Flame weeding is the process of killing weeds in your garden with a flame torch or special flame weeding tool. It works best on pathways, edges, or to kill weeds before planting. You don’t have to actually burn the weeds up, you just need to coterize the leaves which basically explodes all the little plant cells in the leaves. This keeps the weeds from photosynthesizing, and they will die within a few hours.
You can purchase really nice backpack or wheeled propane weed burners designed specifically for killing weeds in the garden, or you can just use a simple propane torch from the hardware store. The specialty weed burners cover a lot of ground quickly and are a great investment for larger operations. I have a simple propane torch and it works well for my needs. I use it in between my potato rows, or on garden soil before planting (see video). It’s important to note that weed burning will work on hair like weeds even before they emerge from the soil especially if you get the torch close to the soil. It will also work on larger weeds as well. This is an easy way to kill a lot of weeds in a short amount of time.
Tip #3 – Landscape Fabric
Using landscape fabric has become my favorite way to control weeds in my garden. Landscape fabric is a fabric that is usually black in color and can be stapled down to the ground to prevent any weeds from growing. It comes in a variety of sizes to fit any garden size. In my opinion, it is the most effective way to prevent weed invasion with the least amount of effort.
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I cover most of my garden with ground cover fabric that is 4’ wide to cover each 30″ wide growing bed and the 18″ pathway between each bed. I burn holes in the fabric with a small torch before planting to make places for the plants to grow and I secure the fabric to the ground with fabric staples every 12-18” on each side, and some in the middle. We get a lot of wind here in Nebraska and I’ve never had any trouble with the fabric blowing away. You can also use sandbags to help hold the fabric in place.
Benefits Of Landscape Fabric
The landscape fabric helps to raise the temperature of the soil because it is black in color which helps your crops to grow faster. It also suppresses the weeds. You will still have to pull the occasional weed that comes up in the holes around the plants, but it will be a lot less weeds than you would have to pull otherwise.
Fabric is also really nice if you live in an area that gets a lot of rain, because it’s easier to walk on the fabric after a rain than it is in the mud. It keeps the garden looking nice and neat. There are different grades of fabric, and my favorite is the 3.2 oz. Dewitt fabric. It is permeable so it allows water through it and it will also last for 8-10 years. This fabric is a good investment for controlling weeds in the garden.
It does take some effort to get it laid in the early spring, but that can be done while it’s cool outside which is much better than weeding in the heat later on in the summer. This kind of fabric is much preferred over something like black plastic, because plastic doesn’t allow the soil to breathe and can actually leach harmful chemicals into the soil. Growing on landscape fabric is what allows me to grow all of my families fruits and vegetables even as a busy Mom of 5.
Tip #4 – Mulch
Mulching involves laying something like grass clippings, hay, straw or wood chips in between the plants in your garden to prevent weeds from growing. It is an effective method for controlling weeds especially if you have access to a lot of these materials. Be sure that you only use organic mulches on your vegetable garden and that it hasn’t been sprayed or treated with any herbicides, or it can harm or even kill your plants. If the mulch has been sprayed with pre-emergent herbicides, it can affect your garden for seasons to come as well.
Some pests like slugs tend to hide in mulch and can do damage to your crops. Mulching also has to be done after the vegetable plants have started to grow tall enough that they won’t be covered up by the mulch, which usually means it’s a hot summer job. It’s important to have a thick layer of mulch so that weeds won’t try to grow through it. Keep in mind that it will shrink down over time as it gets rained on and as it begins to compost. Usually mulch will break down by the following spring when it’s time to till or work your ground, but if you use hay and put it on really thick, sometimes the leftover hay can be a problem for tilling in the spring. Overall, mulching is an inexpensive and successful way of growing a weed-free garden.
Other Kinds Of Mulch
Wood chips are sometimes used to mulch perennial plants, but keep in mind that eventually weed seeds blow in on top of the wood chips, and as they break down the seeds will start to grow weeds. Wood chips have to be added to each year, and although beautiful to look at, they can be a high-maintenance form of mulch.
Another form of mulching and weed control is to grow cover crops on fallow ground, or places where you don’t have anything growing. There are different cover crops you can grow depending on whether the growing season is cool or warm, and depending on what crops you plan to plant next. Cover crops and mulching can also help with soil erosion.
Tip #5 – Hand Weeding
Even if you use some or all of the tips mentioned above to keep weeds out of your garden, you will still need to hand weed next to the plants until they are big enough to shade out the weeds. I usually only have to do this once or twice depending on the crop. Hand weeding is actually my favorite job in the garden and is very enjoyable providing you don’t have to do hours and hours of it. I like to go out early in the morning when it’s cool and spend an hour or two weeding around whatever crops need it.
The most important thing to remember with weeding or even gardening in general is that it’s best to walk through your garden at least once every day. It doesn’t take that much time and you will see all the little things that need attention before they become impossible to fix. You’ll notice the tomatoes that need trellised, or the weeds that are starting to sprout, and you can quickly get ahead of them before they take hours to pull. It’s so worth it take 10 minutes and walk through your garden daily, it is be good for the garden and good for your soul.
FAQ
That depends on whether you have a raised bed garden or an in-ground garden and it also depends on what resources you have available to you. In my experience, the best way to keep weeds out of your garden is with landscape fabric and mulch. For raised garden beds, mulch will probably be easier to use than fabric.
There are a variety of ways to kill weeds in the garden without harming your plants. Cultivating, mulching, flame weeding and hand weeding are all effective methods of weed control.
