The Magic of Controlling Weeds Naturally

The Magic of Controlling Weeds Naturally 

Weeds are just plants growing in places you don’t want them to grow; plants that you consider undesirable, but they insist on growing in your garden anyway. Even the best gardeners have to deal with these nuisance plants. There are, however, ways to deal with reducing the weed problem. Weed seeds exist in the soil of all gardens and can be spread by wind, water, animals, mud on your shoes, and even by the soil amendments we use to help your garden grow. Horse manure, for example, is widely available and is cheap, so it ends up in gardens quite often. Unfortunately the horse doesn’t digest the grasses and weeds it eats thoroughly enough to kill the seeds. To make matters worse, many seeds in your garden can remain dormant for several years, waiting for conditions to be perfect so that they can sprout up overnight (usually the very night after you've just weeded your garden).

Prevention is the best solution. In the fight against weeds, the most important element is to provide the best conditions possible for the growth your favored plants. Improper watering, soil compaction, insect damage and disease all contribute to weed development. These conditions can be easily avoided by proper mulching. 

The importance of mulch cannot be stressed enough. Mulch protects your soil from compaction from raindrops and even walking in the garden. It retains water long after a rain and slows evaporation too. Mulch keeps the sun-baked soil from baking the roots on very hot days. All of this leads to healthy plants that resist disease and insect damage. Healthy garden plants will crowd out some of the weed invaders, but there is more to it than that!

I love the way that wet newspapers laid between the rows would totally smother any weeds that dared to grow in my garden. I always soaked the newspapers rolled up in a 5-gallon pail then laid them on the ground three or four layers thick. The water soaked into the newspaper kept it from blowing away prior to adding mulch. The newspaper totally blotted out the light that might help a germinating seed survive. Light can still sneak through a few inches of mulch and the weedlings can sneak UP through the mulch. By the end of the season the newspaper has nearly disintegrated or was eaten by the earthworms.

After fostering a nurturing environment, the second step is to pluck up any existing offenders by hand. The best time to attack weeds is while they are young, tender and actively growing. Hand weeding is the oldest method around.  It works well on small areas, but isn’t really appropriate for your entire garden. Without harming your crops, you can till the weeds and turn them into the soil with a weeding hoe or any version of this time-tested tool. In the Spring it is a great idea to till the garden a few weeks before planting, this will give the soil a head-start in warming up and also allow a great number of the weed seeds to germinate, exposing the tender sprouts to a violent death by hoe or shovel! Better to NOT expose the weed seeds to the light and prevent their growth by removing the nurturing power of light. I prefer the NO-till methods of Ruth Stout.

Now that we have gotten down and dirty in our fight, we can reduce further confrontation by using barriers. Some people like to use plastic laid down between plants to block weeds. It works well with crops such as melons, pumpkins, eggplants and tomatoes. You can leave the plastic exposed in the spring to help warm up the soil, but as the sun heats up in July, it is a good idea to cover the plastic with straw or any other light colored mulch to protect the plants from overheating. Many gardeners have found that covering the plastic proves to be inconvenient when trying to clean up the garden for the winter, it also gets caught up in the tines of our tillers. An excellent alternative is ordinary newspaper. It's organic, can be tilled into the soil the following Spring and is a lot cheaper than rolls of black plastic. Use a layer of wet newspaper about ¼- inch thick soaked before you lay it to stop it from blowing away. In fact, if you get it well soaked before you lay it, the wet newspaper can be laid more easily even if there is a breeze or wind.

Leaves, grass clippings, straw, sawdust and wood mulch are all great choices for blocking weeds, conserving moisture and adding organic material to the soil and a perfect mulch for covering the newspaper (or plastic, if you insist). If you use grass clippings, be careful to avoid grass treated with petrochemicals to kill broadleaf plants. Your vegetables are almost all broadleaf plants. You can contaminate your organic environment with the very pollutants you've tried to avoid. If you use straw, it is best to let it sit in the rain for the better part of a season to sprout the weed seeds buried in the bale and by letting the bale dry out at times, the weed seeds use up their stores of food. Eventually weed seeds are greatly reduced in number and viability. Then the straw is ready for use as a mulch.

The problem with sawdust or wood mulch is that it will drain nitrogen from the soil until the saw dust has been composted for a year or more. I successfully used sawdust between my landscape plantings because the roots of the shrubs and perennials were well-rooted below the sawdust and the decomposition of the sawdust stole nitrogen from weed seeds that challenged my landscape plan. An occasional weed could be easily be plucked from the sawdust by the alert gardener.

Live mulches are gaining a lot of respect in the garden. This idea is simple, using a fast growing, short plant to cover the surface of the soil around the garden plants.    Thyme is a perfect choice for this method; it can be established quickly from seed, enhances the flavor of many other plants, helps keep insects at bay, and smells so good when you step on it!  Another use of living mulch is the cover crop. If you plant rye in the fall, it will protect the soil from erosion all Winter, add lots of good organic material to your soil when turned over in the Spring, and won’t allow weeds a chance to get established in your plot. But I'd rather avoid the turning of the soil, leaving that task to the earthworms that will happily do the job for you. You just need to give them a few kitchen scraps and a nice thick mulch to keep the cool and damp in the summer and warm in the winter.

Finally, there is now a product that you can apply to stop weeds from germinating in your organic garden!  Corn Gluten meal is a by product of corn syrup and cornstarch production. It contains nitrogen and protein and is sold as animal feed for cows, chickens, and is used as filler in pet foods. Corn Gluten meal can be applied as a fertilizer and as a pre-emergent weed killer. It has been shown to inhibit the growth of dandelions, crabgrass and many other annual weeds. It needs to be supplemented with phosphorus and potassium if you plan to use it for fertilizer though.  If you purchase chicken feed, be sure to check the label to ensure at least 60% corn gluten meal; it should say so near the protein content portion of the label.  The best thing about this method is that it is almost completely safe.  Kids and pets can walk on it barefooted without worry. The only concern is application rate; ten pounds is perfect for a 500 square foot plot, if you go heavier than that, you may not get your desired seedlings to emerge! Some gardeners purposefully apply it heavily in paths; it works well and nothing grows there for the entire season!

You can also use industrial concentrations of acetic acid, an organic that will burn the leaves of plants when sprayed on a hot, sunny day.

There are many ways to control weeds without using the dangerous chemicals commonly pushed by the agrochemical companies. It just takes a bit of knowledge and ingenuity. We have to learn to think like Mother Nature instead of Exxon/Mobil.

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