Weeding question.

[Ricard with an H]

Oh-dear, here I am asking what seems such a stupid question that really doesn't need an expert or experience to resolve.

I got behind on my weeding, my weeding consisted of regularly going between the rows picking out weeds and I kept on top of it.

All of a sudden the weeds are winning and the thought of individually pulling out weeds seems far to time consuming.

Do you people just disturb the weeds by uprooting them and mostly leaving them in place to die, is it necessary to actually remove them from the soil surface altogether ?

Got my knee pads at the ready.

[Pennyroyal]

Hi Richard

No wonder the weeds have gone mad, with all this rain!

Small annual weeds can be pulled out and left on the soil to wither where the weeds are in with plants, either by hand weeding (I use a small garden knife turn over the soil, but a hand fork is fine) or by hoeing beds or between rows. I would not leave them if they are in flower and possibly have seed heads, and I always remove grass for the same reason.

I always remove perennial weeds from the bed, I don't want to give the blighters any chance at all, and they do tend to be a bit woodier.

[Primrose]

I do try and remove my weeds, especially because I have a very insidious weed called oxalis whose leaves look a little like a clover plant but if you leave the slightest fraction of bulbous root in the soil it quickly regenerates itself. I put all of that in a separate container and put that in the rubbish bag rather than consigning it to the compost heap where my general weeds go.
Because I have back problems I'm now trying to hoe more regularly rather than actually pulling weeds out and removing them but I think this is only applying a plaster to the situation to make things look tidier and prevent weeds from seeding when I don't have time to get down and pull them all out.
I agree this time of year is very dispiriting because they come back so quickly. Apart from covering bare soil with a very thick mulch of whatever is conveniently to hand, I think we have to resign ourselves to a losing battle here. The joys of gardening eh??

[Ricard with an H]

Because I have back problems I'm now trying to hoe more regularly rather than actually pulling weeds out and removing them but I think this is only applying a plaster to the situation(

I'm trying that now and for the same reason, my back, hips and knees responds very poorly to bending and crouching. To be honest there have been times when I couldn't get up again and home-alone.

I just had half an hour with that long japanese hoe but i'm scared of messing up some of the planting so i'll half an hour on my knees but on a kneeling pad.

I think for the time being i'll take the advise from Penny and mostly leave them to die other than the creeping buttercup and grass tufts.

Thanks both, gave me a bit more confidence. It was quite depressing this morning looking at the weed growth so I had a day off with Mo in St Davids.

Solva crab sarnie, lovely.
Thanks for the excellent fish and chips Penny.

[peter]

I use a 4' x 18" bit of 1/4" ply with a similarly sized carpet offcut on an old plastic sack, alternating the two and lying or kneeling on one to weed ahead and around before leapfrogging with the other. Also helps to spread my (considerable) weight.

[Ricard with an H]

I found myself thinking along the same lines Peter, some sort of bridging thing.

It's fine weeding on your knees on a comfy mat but if the bed is any wider than three-foot you end up standing, bending and crouching.

Just sliding slightly to one side I realised it was the first time I had a serious weeding session on this border. Earlier in the year I had taken the advise to include sand into my sticky soil, oh-wow, doesn't that make it much easier to pull the weeds out.

I was concerned about including to much sand. Now a I have a bed that looks healthy after the inclusion of sand, and some nutrients it'll give me confidence to include sand into the other planting areas.

Pulling weeds out of sticky soil is ten times more difficult and you end up leaving the root in the soil most of the time.

Penny.
I found a weeding gadget that Mo bought me years ago, it's just a bent piece of wire that forms a hook with a handle. Makes hooking weeds out very easy. I have two and one is for you.

[FelixLeiter]

Do you people just disturb the weeds by uprooting them and mostly leaving them in place to die, is it necessary to actually remove them from the soil surface altogether ?

If the weeds are running away with me, I hoe through them anyway, leaving them on the surface. After a week, some will have re-rooted, in which case take any recidivists out by hand. You'll find the majority of them will have perished, though, and you'll be back in your stride. After mid-summer, fewer weeds seem to emerge as seedlings and you can relax a bit.

[Geoff]

My answer to the original question is that I do both. I try to keep on top of things with the hoe but never do. Last year's wet meant hoeing was usually a waste of time so this year I am paying the price for the chickweed that got away to flower last year. This year I have done better but a week away then damp since I got back has let them get away. Today I weeded the onions by hand; old cushion in a plastic bag and a small sponge pad for one knee I can just about reach half away across my 10' beds. Quite pleased with the finished look. Also hoed the paths between things like peas or, in the case of the photo, my triple bed of sweet peas, broad beans and runner beans. The good forecast suggests I shall be able to do the paths 2 or 3 times this week which I hope will sort them.

[Pennyroyal]

Oh wow Richard, thanks!

I try to pull something out every time I go up to the garden, if only the seeds we sow were as good at growing as weeds! I cannot believe how quickly the ground gets covered in weed seedlings.

How anyone with an allotment copes I do not know, unless they have a bed under the potting bench!

[robo]

I got back from a month away last night, had to go to the hospital with my wife as her right eye is closed due to a bite they decided to keep her in, this morning I phoned and got told to ring back around 12 ish so I went down to the plot to see how things where bloody weeds everywhere so will take a few days of hard work to sort, hoping she is out tomorrow theres a hoe that needs her attention

[Ricard with an H]

Clearly i'm in good company though Geoff is setting the bar for me.

I probably made a mistake when I created my raised beds by making them far too wide at around ten foot square for each one which means I can't easily reach the middle when the bed has crops but I could when the beds were empty. I had noticed that most raised bed designs were no wider than six foot but thought I knew better.

The long japanese hoe (in the photo) I have is a good tool though hoeing with a long hoe isn't as accurate and I have onions and carrot that are probably too close together in my enthusiasm to use as much of the soil as possible. I'm glad I bought the shorter versions.



The planting trench that holds the sea buckthorn is producing a lot of weed, I think I need to keep that weed free for another year. I have managed to use glyphosate but it's a scary operation worrying that spray may drift to the leaves and affect the plantings.

Some of the grassy weeds are pernicious, I have them growing through flowering plants to such an extent that the whole plant has to be lifted, separated, and re-planted. Right now all I have time for is grass cutting, culling invasive growth and weeding, if I had a week off the whole plot would look uncared for.

Nice to sit with a cold beer in the evening and look at tidy grass and tidy everything. I like tidy.

[Ricard with an H]

Right now i'm stuck with a barrow load of grass-sod that had been glyphosated and died so I laid it back where it came from but it started sprouting again.

Presumably I don't want put this stuff into my compost bin, I need to start a new compost pile consisting of perennial weeds and grass sods.

[Pennyroyal]

Grass Sods - that's the right name for them in more ways than one!!!

[Ricard with an H]

The friend who helped me set-up the raised beds told me to rip out the grass sod, turn it over and it'll rot. I thought, glyphosate it, rip it out when it's dead, then place the new soil over.

OK, I missed the ex-met lining but back to grass sod. Even the turves I glyphosated hadn't rotted and had started sprouting when I turned the bed over early in the spring. Advocates of turning green sod over in the hope it will rot will perhaps need to look back for the origins of the turf stack.

Somewhere in my RHS manual of organic gardening they advocate a turf stack to create compost, i'll need to root it out and report back but I do know that a couple of layers will sprout, even a foot of soil over the top and they'll sprout.

Maybe it's time to buy that propane road-torch so I can burn the sods, it's only another £50 to £70 at a time i've spent enough this year. The other option is to do what I do with the cow-poo pile, keep hitting it with glyphosate.

Hmmmm ??? Didn't I say I was nervous about the overuse of glyphosate ?

[peter]

I think the clue is the name, turf stack and it should be in a dark or very shady place.
Drying out above ground and with little light it wil die and rot.
Perhaps in welsh Wales it could do with a roped and pegged down waterproof cover on top as well.


BTW, you're being a fool to yourself if you spray stuff with glyphosate and do not allow it weeks of uninterrupted growing time to die. It only works on healthy actively growing green plants.