Keeping your landscape plantings, flower beds, and nursery crops free of weeds is a battle, but if you approach it with a strategic plan, you will prevail. In order to develop a plan, you first must understand how weeds work, and what kind of weeds you are dealing with.
Weeds are plants and they function just like the desirable plants in your yard. They need water, sunlight and nutrition to survive. Of these three key survival needs, the easiest one for a gardener to eliminate is sunlight. Through proper mulching you can eliminate the sunlight.
In order for your weed control efforts to be truly effective, you should do everything in your power to make your gardens as weed free as possible before you plant or mulch.
The first thing you should do is remove all unwanted vegetation from your planting area. Using a hoe, spade or other digging device, undercut the roots and remove the undesirable plants, roots and all. Then work the soil by rototilling or turning the soil by hand.
Once worked, let the soil sit for four days or so and work it again. Keep doing this over and over as long as time permits. This process serves two purposes; it brings the roots that were left in the soil close to the surface so they can be dried by the sun, which will make them non viable, and it disturbs the weed seeds that have started to germinate, making them non viable as well. The longer you continue this process the more weeds you are eliminating from your garden.
Depending on the time of the year, there are a few billion weed seeds drifting through the air at any given time, so to think that you can eventually rid a garden of weed seed is false thinking. At least this process is effective for the remaining roots, which are the most difficult to control.
With that process complete, go ahead and plant your garden. When you're done planting you can either mulch the bed or keep turning the soil on a weekly basis to keep it free of weeds. Most people opt to mulch. Not only does mulch help to control the weeds, but if you select a natural mulch it also adds organic matter to the soil making for better gardening results down the road.
Before mulching you can spread newspaper (7-9 layers thick) over the soil and place the mulch over top. The newspaper will block the sunlight from reaching the surface of the soil and help to keep weed growth to a minimum. The newspaper will eventually decompose and not permanently alter the make up of your garden.
Paper grocery bags also work well, so the next time you hear, "Paper or Plastic?", you'll know how to answer.
What about black plastic or the weed barrier fabric sold at garden centers? For a truly Eco-friendly, Organic gardening experience, neither is a good substitue. For one, neither one of them ever decompose and the make up of your garden is forever altered until you physically remove them.
Plastic is no good for the soil because soil needs to breath. Plastic blocks the transfer of water and oxygen and eventually your soil will suffer as will your garden. It's all right to use plastic in a vegetable garden as long as you remove it at the end of the season and give the soil a chance to breath.
Weed barrier fabrics allow the soil to breath, but what happens is that when you mulch over top of the fabric, the mulch decomposes and becomes topsoil. Weeds love topsoil and will grow like crazy in it. Only problem is they are growing on top of the fabric. You are then stuck with a ton of problems like a weedy garden. Also removing the fabric could be a larger job than originally anticiaped as the fabric may now be firmly anchored in place with weeds rooting through it.
Weed fabric is also porous enough that if an area becomes exposed to the sunlight, enough light will peek through and weeds below the fabric will grow, pushing their way through the fabric.
Following these simple tips and with regular maintenance, you should be able to keep ahead of the weed battle.
