By Elizabeth Warburton-Smith
Weeds will always be a part of any garden, so let’s talk about how to deal with them in a healthy, non-chemical way.
First of all, let’s define what a weed is. A weed is simply a plant that someone decided shouldn’t be growing in a particular spot. A rose bush with the most beautiful and fragrant blooms could be called a weed by that definition.
As far as ideal or not ideal locations, have you ever noticed weeds pop up overnight in freshly tilled soil? Mother Nature doesn’t like bare soil because it erodes away in the wind and rain, taking all of the living, generative topsoil and leaving heavier, less fertile, rocky or sandy soil behind. Plants that sprout under the harshest of conditions evolved in order to cover the earth and preserve the topsoil. This in turn preserves native grasses, plants, bushes, vines, and trees, creating overall healthy and complex ecosystems suited to individual climates.
Weeds are almost always plants that easily sprout on their own without any help from humans. They will grow wherever the conditions are right. Typically they only need bare soil, sunshine, and a little bit of moisture. Wouldn’t it be great if the plants we planted purposefully grew so easily? We have been conditioned to try and put nature in a neat little box. But it takes a lot of effort and commitment to make that happen when we choose non-native plants that usually do not grow with the same hardiness that a native plant will.
But I get that we all want to grow familiar summer veggies on purpose. Here are some great ways to prevent your carefully chosen, non-native plants from becoming overrun with more aggressive native plants that populate your garden all by themselves.
The very best method of weed control is applying a thick, 4-6 inch layer of wood chip mulch on top of your soil. The wood chip mulch does several amazing things; smothering any weed seeds touching the surface of the soil underneath, keeping your soil dust free in the summer and mud free during rains, creating the perfect environment for living organisms that build soil like beneficial bacteria, fungi, mychorrizae, and earthworms, and decomposing into dark, rich soil.
If you use this method, it’s very important to keep this layer of wood chip mulch on top of the surface of your soil. If you dig it into existing soil, it will bring up weed seeds and expose them to sunlight, which in turn makes them to germinate. Wood chip mulch decomposes and will bind nitrogen in the first phase of decomposition. You don’t want it to pull away from plant roots, so keep it above your plants until it turns entirely into soil.
You could also try the “no-till” growing method. In this method the soil stays covered, and you don’t turn it over. This prevents the weed seeds from being exposed to bare soil, so there are less weeds to deal with.
Another method is to plant cover crops in between more fragile non-native plants. Cover crops include clover, buckwheat, and legumes. Legumes can “fix” or collect nitrogen from the air, and through a complex process, release it below ground into the soil. Not only will these cover crops dominate the surface and help prevent less desirable plants from growing, they also feed the soil. Cover crops can create as much as 100 lbs of pure, organic nitrogen per acre.
The weed dragon is another method of prevent weeds. The weed dragon is simply a propane torch that aims the flame aimed at weeds. Be sure to have someone follow you with a garden hose for safety reasons. The idea is not to burn the weed to crispy ash but to heat up the plants’ cells to boiling — at which point it will no longer be viable. You don’t want to just toast them to bits. Mother Nature, in her wisdom, uses fire to regenerate many plants. Be sure to kill them at the cellular level with a slow kill. Be patient and wait a couple of days to see if the weed has died off.
The final method of preventing weeds without using soil killing chemicals is to pull them up from the roots by hand before they have a chance to put off seeds and regenerate. The ideal is after a nice rain. Use a weed fork to ensure you get the entire plant, root and all.
