Produced by
Patti Moreno
Contributor to:
Organic Gardening Articles:
Weed control has been an issue for gardener’s going back thousands of years and one of the things that bedeviled me in my early gardening years. Let’s face it, weeding is pain, it can be back breaking, ruin the “look” of your garden and rob your plants of needed sunlight, water and nutrients. But a few years back I learned that weeds are essentially missed placed plants, they are kind of like teenagers, they just want food, shelter and a place to reproduce and your garden is a wonderful place for them to do that. As an organic gardener your goal isn’t complete eradication, if it is you’re probably reading the wrong magazine, the goal is, like with teenagers, control and I find that there are three major steps in controlling your weeds. The most important thing is proper set up and preparation. If you take the time to set up your garden properly you can reduce your time in maintenance, by almost 70%. The simplest thing you can do, weather you garden rows or in raised beds like I do is provide an actual physical barrier to keep those pesky weeds in check.
I get emails every month from people who are plagued with weeds and thus lose their enthusiasm for their garden because they find all there time taken up trying to pull weeds. They lose interest and in no time nature does what it does and their garden and harvests are a mess. The first thing to do is start with a clean slate every year. Remember Mother Nature has spent all fall spreading seeds into your garden so that as the soil heats up and the days get longer those seeds are getting ready to establish themselves in your garden. So what I do, is I save all the newspaper and cardboard that I can all winter and in the early spring I cover my garden beds completely with it (up to a ½ inch thick). What happens is all those weed seeds start germinating under the newspaper and cardboard for a month or so. Because the sprouts get no light they quickly die and become part of my “green manure” in the garden bed. This simple and super easy step takes care of my weeds before I have even planted any of my veggies. My worms and other bacteria feed on the newspaper leaving natural fertilizer behind and my garden is ready to plant about a six weeks after laying down the mulch.
Since I start most of my spring crop indoors under grow lights, when I bring my plants out to the garden they have a six week head start on Mother Nature’s plants. I simply punch a hole through the now decomposed newspaper and cardboard and plant my veggies. This is super important as a new gardener, because often it is really hard to tell the difference between a weed and one of your veggies when they are sprouts. But by planting you veggies in a organized way, when they are already six weeks or so old, it is very easy to see what plant is misplaced and thus a weed and easily pulled before it has had a chance to establish itself.
Now, not all weed seeds arrive in the fall, some hit the wind in the spring. In my garden I have a giant maple tree that loves to scatter little helicopters down every spring into my garden. The tree is over a hundred years old and it is her goal to turn everything into a maple forest! So, to keep her in check about halfway through the spring I bring out more newspaper and place strips of it around my plants, and then I top dress it with cocoa shell mulch. Cocoa Shell is great. It smells fantastic and decomposes rapidly in the garden bed. The downside is that if you have an unusually stupid dog, they may try to eat it, which will make them sick. The cocoa mulch makes a great background so that any maple seeds or misplaced plant sprouts stand out easily and it is no sweat to pick them out.
There are lots of ways to set up a physical barrier as well. I used to use black plastic with a mulch on top, and then cut holes in the plastic for the plants. This works great for keeping the weeds down, but is makes watering the plants more difficult. I have found that overall the best thing is to use layers of newspaper or cardboard, because the water can seep through and provides a great barrier against the weeds. Other tricks that work are companion planting and crowding. For example the Native Americans worked this out millennia ago, in a method known as “three sisters” planting, you plant your corn, beans and gourds together. The beans grow up the corn stalk, replacing the nitrogen the corn is devouring and the gourds cover the ground surface preventing weeds from getting the sunlight. For more on Three Sisters companion planting check out www.organicgardening.com where my blog has a few more helpful hints on making your garden healthy and easily maintained.
PEST CONTROL
The worst thing in the world of gardening is to take months growing and nurturing a veggie only to find that some creepy crawly has gotten there first had a meal and raised its family. Just plain nasty and discouraging, but the organic gardener really has nothing to fear. Our society is so used to taking a pill or using a chemical to cure a problem that many of the old ways have simply been forgotten. I grew up in New York City and I can tell you for sure that when there is a pest, there is a chemical spray with names of ingredients that I can not pronounce. But as a gardener, you have to keep up, and the most important thing to keeping a garden creepy crawly free is maintaining healthy soil. Think of yourself as a manager of natural processes and you will naturally keep those pests at bay.
Always rotate your crops. No matter how small or large your garden is if you grow the same plant in the same place year after year some bug or disease will find it and move in. Hundreds of years ago, it became clear that crop rotation increased yields, and it is the same in your backyard. The Potato famine in Ireland is prime example of this. For years farmers were able to get high crop yields from the same place year after year until a bacterial infection established itself in the soil and destroyed the harvest, starving millions.
Next is companion planting. My favorite plant that “works” all over my garden is Marigold. They have pretty flowers and come in a variety of sizes, from really small petite varieties to giant African plants. Most people don’t realize it, but the marigold works it’s magic underneath the soil surface. It’s roots create very effective barriers to harmful nematodes (worm like creatures) that feed on veggie roots. Most of my garden beds have marigold plants standing guard over them
Not only am I known as the Garden Girl, but in neighborhood my first name was the Tomato Lady and I was consistently plagued by this little no-seeum flies which I later discovered to be several different species: aphids, mites and other creepums (fake Latin for bug) and low and behold it’s the perfect companion for Tomato’s. Basil, my old friend, the heart and soul of my Italian kitchen, turns out to be a great bug deterrent that also helps keep the Tomato Horn worm and a bunch of different leaf chewing beetles at bay. I swear by companion planting your basil with your tomato’s, the tomato’s even start to taste better! It’s almost like infusing basil flavor into your tomato.
Sometimes you will find certain creepums that will laugh at your companion planting strategy and holocaust your plants anyway. When that happens I pull out my heavy duty weapons: Diatomaceous Earth (DE) and Nicotine sprays. Now these have to be thought of as weapons of mass destruction and not used willy nilly.
DE: Is actually fossilized algae and plankton. It kills all hard shelled insects by creating tiny little cuts in their shells and causing them to die of dehydration. It is extremely effective. The problem is it kills all bugs even the ones you want to have around like your local honey bee population.
Nicotine: Is one of natures most perfect poisons, and up until the petro-chemical age was the bug spray of choice for gardeners and farmers. It is readily available at independent garden centers and is easy to make at home by brewing up tobacco leaves. It’s evaporates very quickly so it is less likely to harm your local bee population. It also works on soil borne pests as well. And it is not so great on the Nightshade family, like Tomato and Potato, of plants as they may absorb it into the fruit and leaves. A nicotine spray is very dangerous however, and should be treated as any dangerous chemical and should never be used when harvest is near.
I love it when old school gardeners ask me what I do about pests without using chemicals with names I can’t pronounce. I smile and I say Mother Nature takes care of all of that, I just manage the natural system.
