Controlling Garden Weeds – Barbara Pleasant

If left unsmothered, the open soil in the beds would be overrun with chick- weed, henbit, and wild violets. With the help of lettuce (especially fast- growing leafy types),I must weed my spring garden only once or twice, and always get two crops instead of one from a limited amount of space. In warmer weather, you might use other plants as smother crops.I often sow crowder peas in unoccupied beds in midsummer and thin back the stand (by pulling out individual plants) before sowing late crops of carrots, beets, parsley, and other vegetables that have a hard time sprouting when the days are so hot that the soil heats up and dries out daily.

The shade from the legumes helps keep the soil moist enough to facilitate germination. When the carrots or other crops attain the status of sprouts,I pull out the rest of the peas, which all the while have been fixing nitrogen in the soil and suppressing weeds. Mulches Almost all weed seeds need light to germinate and grow. Light functions like a trigger to some weed seeds that wait in the soil for years, deactivated by darkness.

Mulches control weeds by depriving them of life-giving light. The best mulches for suppressing weeds are the ones you already have. In fall, spread chopped leaves over empty beds to keep chick- weed and henbit at bay. If you run over the leaves with a lawn mower before you pile them on your soil, they will sufficiently decompose over the winter so you can simply turn them under in spring.

Stockpile extra leaves to use around garden plants during the summer months. Pine tree needles are useful, too, though they are acidic and tend to help naturally acidic soil stay that way. Use them to discourage weeds around plants that like acidic conditions, such as strawberries, azaleas, and rhododendrons. Environmentally minded lawn-keepers are advised to let grass clippings rot where they fall, but they also make great mulch.I hook the bagger on my mower when I cut my backyard; then the clippings go straight from the bag into flower beds.

You can go for years without buying mulch materials, but in the end weathered wheat straw may be worth its modest price. Unlike hay, which usually contains zillions of weed seeds, wheat and oat straw are normally pretty clean. If you can find some that’s been rained on (so its value as animal food is low), buy it.

Besides suppressing weeds by depriving the seeds of light, wheat and oat straw are believed to leach out chemicals that act as natural herbicides.

Weed Seeds and Self-Propagation The Weed Seed Bank Protecting Your Garden from Weed Seeds The Myth about Weedy Manure Solar-Powered Weeds Underground Weeds The Secrets of Weed Survival The Weedy Advantage: Crop Mimicry Masquerading Weeds Weed-to-Plant Warfare Fighting the War Against Weeds Cover Crops Cover Crops and Wide-Row Planting Smother Crops Mulches Store-Bought Mulches Hands-On Weeding About Herbicides Weed Disposal Beware of Cultivating Invasive Plants Ten Tips for Managing Your Weeds The Brighter Side of Weeds Index of Weed Illustrations OceanofPDF.com Why Weeds?

Weeds are the plants gardeners love to hate. Through the ages, people have attempted to define weeds, always with inadequate results. Are they “plants whose virtues have yet to be discovered” (Walt Whitman), “guardians of the soil”(Joseph Cocannouer), or something equally nice, or are they sly thieves that steal the soil’s resources and gardeners’ precious time? Perhaps they can only really be defined from a practical point of view: Weeds are any plants that insist on growing where you don’t want them to grow.

It so happens that unwanted trespassers in your garden tend to be the same plants time after time. These true garden weeds are special, for they thrive on the constantly changing soil conditions that take place in gardens as we plant and replant our beds, borders, and rows.

Many wild plants that are technically classified as weeds cannot tolerate the continual shifting about that we gardeners do, so it’s more fitting to regard them as wildflowers than as garden weeds. Examples include wild asters, daisies, ironweeds, goldenrods, and sunflowers. Rarely will you catch these roadside weeds trying to crowd out your tomatoes or attempting to steal nutrients from the soil you prepared for your lilies.

These dastardly deeds are done by what I call garden weeds — plants like crabgrass, redroot pigweed, lambsquarters, and others. We tend to think of weeds as superplants because they do such a great job of invading our gardens, but in reality weeds can only thrive where we make a place for them. Garden weeds are experts at colonizing disturbed soil, which is exactly what a garden is to a weed — a space where the earth has been opened up.

For this much weeds must be respected. Weeds, in turn, have no respect for a gardener’s goal of enriching land with beautiful, fragrant, delicious, and otherwise useful plants. Yet the missions of gardeners and the objectives of weeds are often the same: to bring stability to disturbed sites so that those places can regain their lost function in nature’s wild scheme. Weeds just go about things differently than we do.

Ecologically speaking, most garden weeds are weaklings in the long run. They do a terrible job of adapting to natural ecosystems (like a mature forest or grassy prairie).

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Title: –
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