Weeding & Weed Control

Weeding the Garden • Tips & Recommendations with Niki Jabbour

Weeding is one of the least enjoyed garden chores, but it is essential for promoting healthy plant growth. Weeds compete with our crops for nutrients, light, and water, and should be removed preferably while they're still young and immature. Today, I'm going to share with you some strategies and techniques for reducing garden weeds.

A weed is simply any unwanted garden plant, and common weeds include plants like chickweed, purslane, and lamb's quarters. But, even vegetable crops that are allowed to reseed can become weedy. Many types of weeds spread quickly and can choke out vegetables which are most vulnerable when they're at the seedling stage.

How Weeds Spread

Weeds can spread in different ways:

  1. By self-seeding
  2. via rhizomes, which are horizontally growing underground stems
  3. or by stolons, horizontal stems that grow on the soil surface.

Although I have a few perennial weeds in my garden, most of the weeds that pop up come from an outside source, such as the manure I add to my beds. Ideally, use composted manure, which has had time to kill off many of the weed seeds present in the material. To reduce weeds from newly amended beds, I keep an eye on the soil, pulling up weeds as they appear.

Identifying Common Weeds

It's also a useful skill to be able to identify the weeds that are common in your garden, not just at a mature stage like this lamb's quarters, but also in the seedling stage. I've gotten to know weeds like pigweed, purslane, and lamb's quarters, and aim to pull them out when they're just an inch or two tall.

Weed Early, Weed Often

As I mentioned earlier, weeds compete with your crops for light, water, and nutrients, which is undesirable when you're trying to encourage healthy plant growth from your crops. But, if you wait too long to weed, you may accidentally damage your vegetables when you do finally get around to weeding.

If crops are growing densely with weeds, you may unintentionally pull out your food plants along with the weeds, or damage their roots or tops. Try to stay on top of weeding.

3 Strategies to Reduce Weeds

Here are three strategies for reducing weeds that I put to work in my garden.

  1. Don't overwork the soil. Soil contains a seed bank of weed seeds, and when it's disturbed they can be triggered to germinate. Cultivate only the soil you need to and when you're done cover it up with mulch to discourage weeds.
  2. Never let weeds go to seed. Don't keep putting off weeding until the plants have flowered and set seeds. The last thing you want to do is add to the weed seed bank in the soil. If you don't have time to thoroughly weed, at least chop off the immature seed heads to limit the spread and a bunch of future work.
  3. Finally, mulch. Mulching with an organic material like straw or commercial mulches made from biodegradable plastic or paper is a great way to conserve soil moisture and discourage weeds. If using straw or shredded leaves, add a layer to the soil surface that is at least 3 in deep.

Water Smart to Avoid Weeds

One more tip, smart watering can also reduce weed growth. When you irrigate your garden, water the crops and not the entire garden bed if possible. Using a system like drip irrigation and soaker hoses directs water to your plants leaving other areas where weeds may grow dry.

Weeding Techniques

Okay, now that we've covered some strategies, Let's talk techniques.

There's an old farm saying, "Pull weeds when wet, hoe weeds when dry." And I try to follow that advice. When I've got weeds to pull, I'm going to do so after a rain when the roots of the weeds will slip easier from the wet soil.

In dry weather, use a hoe like a collinear hoe or a stirrup hoe to remove weeds.

A stirrup hoe cuts weeds as you push and pull it covering a large area in a short amount of time. It has a thin blade that slices weeds off just below the soil surface in garden beds as well as in pathways.

A collinear hoe is a precision tool that quickly and easily eliminates weeds. It's best used when you're standing in an upright position and the thin sharp blade is drawn across the soil surface.

Hoes are most effective when the weeds are immature and the cut plants can be left on the soil surface to dry up and decompose.

Happy growing!



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