How to keep weeds out of garden Easily? (2023 Guide)
- Author: Saiqa Najeeb
- Last Updated On: July 11, 2023
The majority of them will be invisible, but if you dig a shovelful of soil out of the earth, there are very definitely hundreds of weed seeds in it. Scientists and farmers refer to this vast collection of seeds as a “weed seed bank.” Each seed in this bank is alive and ready to germinate and flourish given the correct conditions.
These invasive species can compete for resources and strangle your carefully cultivated plants. But don’t be concerned! We’ll walk you through the science of weeds and how to keep weeds out of garden.
Buckle up and continue reading!
Why are weeds such a problem?
Weed seeds thrive in conditions that favor your tomatoes, okra, or peas. You must take steps to keep weeds from overtaking your intended vegetation.
In addition to weeds, most gardening involves annual plants that must be cultivated from seed each year. These plants begin small and struggle to compete for sunshine, water, and soil nutrients early on. Because their small leaves enable light to reach the ground and encourage weed development, some plants, such as onions, are particularly weak competitors.
While some annual plants, such as tomatoes, eventually shade out competition, they take a long time to grow, leaving plenty of exposed territory for weeds to thrive. Weeds will take advantage of any open soil.
Unfortunately, weed seeds can remain dormant in the soil for years or even decades before sprouting. This means that even if you weed your garden meticulously and prevent new weed seeds from developing, you will still have weeds every year. However, frequent weeding over time should eventually reduce the weed problem.
Explore our guide on essential gardening tools guide here.
What makes a plant a weed?
A weed, in one sense, is anything you don’t want in your garden. Weeds range from the harmless and easy to maintain (such as “volunteer” tomatoes, which sprout from the seeds of fruit you didn’t harvest the previous year) to the nasty (such as Canada thistle, which may take over and devastate your garden unless you take serious measures to prevent it). One person’s weed may be another person’s treasure (an example is the herb chamomile, which some people adore and others despise).
How to keep weeds out of garden?
The most effective strategy to control weeds is to prevent their growth from the start. It is critical to keep your soil as covered as possible since exposed dirt fosters weed development. While you may need to expose areas of your garden to apply fertiliser or plant seeds, the most of it may be continually mulched. For effective weed management, various mulching materials and approaches can be investigated. Some weeds may germinate even under mulch, although they will be weaker and easier to eliminate than those growing in bare soil.
Even if you mulch, you will still have to deal with weeds. Hand weeding with little tools or using a hoe are the most common methods for weeding in a garden. It is critical to use caution during weeding. It is critical to completely eliminate the weed roots during weeding.
Simply removing the tops will result in regrowth, making it more difficult to eliminate the roots later. Weeding after rain or irrigation can make root removal easier, but don’t allow plucked weeds sit in touch with the ground for too long, as they can regrow roots and live. It is best to physically eliminate removed weeds from your garden, such as by composting them or ensuring that their roots cannot reach the soil.
Check out our guide on How to start your vegetable garden.
Hand weeding
Gardeners with small plots (or those who utilise a lot of mulch) may never do anything other than weed by hand. On one level, hand weeding is straightforward: find a weed and pluck it up. In practice, pulling weeds so that the roots are removed requires some practice and may require the use of a trowel, a probing tool, or even a shovel for huge weeds (see tools for images of these devices).
Weeds might also be difficult to distinguish from your desired crops at times. This is common when growing plants from seed when the baby seedlings have just emerged from the earth. There may be weeds growing alongside them, but you can’t tell them apart from your plants.
Usually, all you need to do is wait a few days to a week and let all of the plants grow a little bigger before you can tell them apart and pull the weeds. If your plants are small (or the weeds are large), you may need to use one hand to hold down the dirt around your targeted plants while using your other hand to pull neighbouring weeds.
Check out our guide on gardening in raised bed layout.
Weeding with a hoe
If your garden is large and/or there are huge exposed spaces (such as between young tomato plants), you may want to dig out weeds with a hoe. Using a hoe requires a chopping action that you must learn on your own. Keep in mind that your goal is to uproot weeds, not simply cut their stems off. If you have a hoe with a narrow head and want to experiment, you might be able to hoe out even very small weeds that are close to small plants. A hoe should be kept sharp, and if you use it frequently (especially in hard or rocky surface), you should sharpen it with a file or chisel.
What to do with weeds once you pull them out?
What you do with weeds once you’ve plucked or hoed them out of the ground is determined by a number of factors. Weeds that are left on top of the soil may reroot and grow again if it is wet outside (or if it is expected to rain soon), so remove them from the garden, possibly to a compost pile. If the weather is dry, you can arrange the weeds around your selected plants and use them as mulch to keep other weeds at bay. If the weeds have started to develop seeds, remove them from the garden and dispose of them somewhere other than your compost pile (some composting processes kill weed seeds, while others do not).
Check out our guide on container gardening 101.
How obsessive should you be about weeding?
Is it necessary to pull every weed in your garden? No. You may spend half an hour pulling 95% of the weeds in the garden, or two hours pulling 99% of the weeds. Most of us could spend that one and a half hours doing something else. For the reasons stated above, even if you were to pull every weed that sprouted, you would still have weeds in the future, so preventing every weed from sprouting is not worth your time.
That said, weeding is vital in general since weeds can substantially impair your garden’s productivity, and there are particular weeds that you need to control as vigorously as possible (see weeds for a few of the worst of them), or you’ll end up with no garden at all. Even if you do allow weeds to grow, you can save yourself (and your neighbours) time by cutting off the blooming heads before the seeds appear.
What to do with weeds once you pull them out?
What you do with weeds once you’ve plucked or hoed them out of the ground is determined by a number of factors. Weeds that are left on top of the soil may reroot and grow again if it is wet outside (or if it is expected to rain soon), so remove them from the garden, possibly to a compost pile. If the weather is dry, you can arrange the weeds around your selected plants and use them as mulch to keep other weeds at bay. If the weeds have started to develop seeds, remove them from the garden and dispose of them somewhere other than your compost pile (some composting processes kill weed seeds, while others do not).
Check out our guide on container gardening 101.
Grass weeds – a special case
If you are starting a new garden plot from a place that previously had grass growing on it (or if you took over a garden that has been affected by grass weeds), you may have to conduct some different and potentially time-consuming weeding.
Check out how to choose the best soil for your vegetable garden.
Weeds through the season
Weeds are not an ongoing issue throughout the year. Weed seeds germinate in large quantities in the spring and early summer. By late July or early August, new weeds are emerging in considerably lesser numbers (though existing weeds are still developing rapidly). If you can make it to this point in the season, you should notice that the weeding effort slows down and you can concentrate on the harvest and pleasure (and possibly processing and storage) of your crops.
Perennial crops and weeds
You might cultivate some perennial crops, which regrow from underground roots for several years in a row. Some of these are woody, which means they have one or more woody stems that live through the winter (for example, blackberries, raspberries, apples, and pears). Others are herbaceous, or non-woody, and survive the winter only as roots (rhubarb, asparagus, and other herbs are examples).
Perennials might take several years to develop, but once established, they have an advantage over weeds each year. However, because perennials rest in one spot and grow large, it might be tough to pull weeds around them. If you do this correctly, your perennials will reward you.
Read our comprehensive guide on Flower gardening 101
The Bottom Line
Now you have uncovered a multitude of strategies about how to keep weeds out of garden. It’s important to remember, that a completely weed-free garden may be an unattainable ideal. But you can implement these strategies to reduce the weed populations significantly.
With the right knowledge and a little bit of sweat, you can minimize the effect of these garden weeds to the maximum.
