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Lets get the bad news out of the way first: If you have a garden, you are going to have weeds. You've seen those "Never Weed Again" claims?? Don't believe them!
Now for the good news: There are lots of ways to minimize weeding in your vegetable garden, leaving you way more time to sit back and watch those tomatoes grow and ripen!
Crowd them out! This is one of the reasons we do so much wide row planting in the vegetable garden. Those thickly planted wide rows just out-compete the weeds! And fewer paths leave fewer places for weeds to grow, as well. In the perennial garden, hostas and many other perennials also do a great job of discouraging the weeds, once they grow big enough to fill their space
Smother them! We're big advocates of mulching and Planters Paper is our favorite vegetable garden mulch. Planters Paper is made from corn and, unlike black plastic, will break down over the course of the summer and can be tilled or dug back into the garden. No nasty plastic to deal with in the fall! We cover it with mulch hay to hold it down, but you can use any organic mulch - or just hold it in place with stakes or even rocks!
IRT mulch is another option for heat-loving plants. IRT stands for "infrared transmitting" which means that it allows sun rays in, but no heat out. It does a much better job than any other mulch in warming the ground and several studies have shown that warm weather crops, such as tomatoes and melons, respond brilliantly to the additional heat. IRT is plastic and you will need to take it up in the fall if you use it with annual plants. NOTE: don’t cover IRT mulch with any other material or its infrared transmitting qualities will be lost.
For permanent plantings, such as in the perennial garden or around fruit plants, we use landscape fabric. This is a woven material, usually made of polypropylene that is a very effective weed barrier. Because it is woven, it allows water to penetrate to the ground below, making watering much more effective. Landscape fabric can be held in place with long metal pins, called ground staples. Depending on where and why we use it, we sometimes cover landscape fabric with bark mulch to improve its appearance.
And if you really like the idea of mulching to control weeds, you may want to explore the method employed by Ruth Stout, the Grand Dame of Permanent Mulch!
Weed early and often! It is much, Much, MUCH easier to remove tiny weeds than giant ones. When we’re on top of things (ok, stop laughing!), we run through our extensive gardens once a week, using a shuffle hoe (our favorite weeding tool), and can do them all in about four hours. Let those weeds get big and strong, however, and it's a different story altogether!
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