Weeding the Beds

Last weekend was an extremely busy one following a rather cool, rainy week. This gave me little chance to get out into the garden. It's never a good idea to work in the garden when the foliage is wet as this will cause any existing plant disease to spread rapidly. Yet checking the gardens daily is important to catch any potential problems before they become problems. Saturday morning I decided to spend a little quality time in the garden before we left for a family gathering.

Lots of Weeds

The few spells of warmer daytime temperatures combined with lots of water has been very good for the garden beds. Unfortunately these conditions have also been ideal for the weeds. As you can see it was getting to the point of being difficult to see the pepper plants!

Weeds in and of themselves are not always a bad thing. In fact you can use them to your advantage to help protect seedlings from certain pests until they become established then pull the weeds to allow the desired plants to continue growing. Other weeds such as pig weed and dandelions are edible plants so may even be desirable to leave a few in your garden. I decided to do a fairly good weeding to get the beds under control and keep weeds to a minimum. Notice the minimum as I am not a fanatic at keeping a completely weed free garden. A few weeds will continue to offer a bit of insect protection but too many weeds will take up too many nutrients so a bit of balance is good.

Partly Weeded

Weeding raised beds planted in the square foot gardening method is rather easy. I sit on a small stool then using my handheld cultivator I break the soil then move the cultivator back and forth in a zig zag manner. This loosens the soil while doing the weeding. Then I simply pick up the weeds roots and all and put them in my weed bucket. It is simple yet effective. I weeded 24 of the 40 squares of the first garden in about 20 minutes using this method combined with some basic pulling through the lettuces.

One thing that I find rather interesting is the squares with marigolds in them had very little in the way of weeds. The herb garden looked almost bare in the unplanted squares in comparison to the tomato, pepper and lettuces bed. I finished up the weeding of this bed and the herb bed Sunday morning spending a half hour before leaving for an afternoon of boating. Now the beds have been fully weeded, keeping the weeds in check is as easy a pulling any as they appear. I usually pull a few weeds each day when I check the beds so a longer weeding session is seldom needed.

Happy Gardening!

Garden Gnome
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