We received a little over 3 inches of rain on Sunday night/Monday morning and I am again thankful for the rain because it means I have had to do a lot less watering of the garden.
Over the weekend I noticed that our garden had quite a few weeds in it, and I thought I better take care of them before they took over.
I used to always say that I was good at growing weeds and children, but I am trying to just be good at growing children instead of being good at both.
There are several methods for how to deal with weeds. Here is the best one I have found. Till the garden where you can and use a hoe or your hands to get rid of the weeds the tiller can’t reach.
Sure, you can put newspaper and straw down, but it is a lot of work and sometimes the weeds still find a way (I speak from experience.). Yes, you can use weed killer, but you will probably kill your plants at the same time not to mention making the ground toxic.
So, on Saturday I spent about 2 hours tilling and weeding my garden to get rid of (most of) the weeds.
The garden looks so much better and I am happy to have spent the time and effort to take care of them before they got much bigger. I will still probably have to do it again in the next week or so, but it is a small price to pay to not have my plants choked out by weeds.
The onions were one of the most weedy areas in the garden, but look at them now.
The green beans and corn had quite a few weeds growing amongst them, but look at how much they have grown since I got rid of the weeds.
One way to keep weeds at bay is to stagger plant like I did with the cabbage at the bottom of the picture below. They have grown together and now the weeds don’t have any good place to grow.
Obviously, containers and raised beds are a good way to help keep the weeds at bay if you want to utilize them. The lettuce in my counter height garden box is just about ready to eat, and it’s weed free.
I am really amazed at how much the cucumbers have grown this past week. They are starting to climb the fence. After I took this picture I did give the cucumber plants some help and poked each plant through the fence so that they would start growing up since some of them were growing out along the ground.
The hills of zucchini are really growing well, too.
Since I dealt with the weeds that were around the sugar snap peas they have really grown. The plants have been attaching themselves to the tomato cage trellis.
Take a look at what I found on my Early Girl tomato plants. Green tomatoes! I am so excited.
The two potato towers that I planted first are already ready for their final layer of straw and soil. This method of growing potatoes is a great way to keep the weeds out of the potatoes. However, I need to do a better job of getting rid of the weeds on the outside of the tower.
My sweet potato plants are still the slowest growing plants in the garden, but they were the ones that got eaten down to the ground by rabbits so they really are doing well.
Speaking of rabbits, they are so resourceful. A couple of them have found some way to jump on a concrete block to get over the fence. I had no idea they would be this persistent. This means I am still working to keep the rabbits out of my garden even though I have rabbit fencing up.
Well, that about does it for this week’s garden update. How do you get rid of weeds in your garden?
