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weeds in beds
Mozza3
Posts: 35
Hello all. We have a largish bed in the centre of a long garden. It tends to flood in the winter (keeps the water off the lawn so I don't mind too much, so we struggle to put anything nice in there, and lay bedding plants in spring. It gets pretty weedy normally, and we struggle to keep on top of it, but pledged to give it a weekly go this year. However after an hour or two at it yesterday ( a sunny day) there are already small seedlings of weeds cropping up all over. . In literally a few hours. There's are no heavy weeds, it's just infested with these small weeds. What is the best way to deal with this? We don't really have the time, not withstanding bad weather at the weekends, to deal with it all the time.
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You need a Dutch hoe, then once a week you spend a few minutes just tickling the soil to get rid of those weed seedlings - this video shows you how eventually, when he stops talking about flowers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH9QJYbp3zo .
It's actually very easy light work which takes no time at all.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
If they're just annual weeds Mozza, you can gently push a hoe or similar in there to chop through them. Once you've done that, you could put a thick mulch over the bare ground - perhaps gravel would be the best option - and that will help suppress them for a little longer! If you plant a bit of evergreen or semi evrgreen groundcover that will also help save time, or you could use a couple of more robust shrubs in the bed which will withstand a bit of extra wet weather. Digging some gravel and farmyard manure into the bed will also help it cope with the waterlogging and allow you to grow a bit more in the bed.
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
It looks like we've been digging too much then to try to remove all trace. The clip tells you to leave the seedlings to dry up.
Thanks for this, I'll give ita go.
The other problem is that at about 30 cms down its Rubble, so roots really struggle
Hoe, hoe, hoe. (It's Father Christmas's favourite garden tool).
Just shallowly so you don't bring up more seeds from the depths, and preferably in hot dry weather (if you ever get any!) so the dear little things shrivel and die on the surface. As St Bob says, if you hoe when you can't see any weeds, you'll never see any weeds.
Wish I could stick to this!
when I first went to work in a garden centre in 1979 my boss told me the best weedkiller on the market was a stainless steel hoe and the best time to use it was just before the weeds germinated.