If you feel like you’re constantly battling weeds in your yard, here’s one thing I’ve learned: The only way to beat weeds is to be strategic about them. Removal is only part of it—you also have to keep them from coming back.
None of us want to spend time on our hands and knees pulling weeds all day. But with a few simple strategies, you can effectively manage weeds in your garden and stop working so hard on your harvest.
This is what I do every year to keep annual weeds under control (besides picking and eating them—yes, some of them pesky weeds are actually edible!).
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1. Weed when the weeding is good.
This means you approach your weeds when they are small and easily removed, and do it when the soil is soft and forgiving (usually in the spring, but anytime after a good rain is a great opportunity).
Take a few minutes each day to go outside and simply observe your garden. This helps you spot any new weeds that appear so you can pull them right away. When they’re young, they haven’t had time to root and haven’t gone to seed, so they’re fairly harmless as far as weeds are concerned.
This means you can simply leave the pulled weeds on top of the soil and return them to mulch, or drop the weeds onto your garden paths where they will be walked on, wet and eventually composted into the soil.
2. Use the stale seedbed technique.
You know how weeds always seem to get worse after a rain? The stale seedbed technique uses the same idea to your advantage.
Before planting vegetable crops in a new garden bed, water the soil thoroughly so that the first half inch is saturated. Wait a week or two for all the deceptive weeds to sprout, then pull them by hand or hoe them shallow. (Weed seeds generally only grow if they are on top of the soil.)
Sow or transplant without disturbing the soil more than necessary. Or if you really want to make the seed “stale”, you can repeat the process before sowing or planting.
3. Don’t pull your weeds—cut them.
As gardeners, our first instinct when we see a weed in the ground is to pull it out. This can be fine for small weeds, but if it’s a large weed (like the one below), then all that turned over soil has probably just brought dormant weed seeds to the surface, giving them a chance at life (and reducing the effectiveness of the mulch at that point).
So, if you want to avoid future weeds, cut them—don’t pull them.
It is recommended
This is the knife
This versatile Japanese soil knife can cut, uproot, sweep, dig or transplant. It is one of my most used gardening tools!
Use a hori hori knife to cut the plant just below the stems and at the top of the roots, as follows:
Be sure to cut below the crown (where the stems and roots meet), as some weeds may grow new leaves if the crown is left intact.
Throw away the plant but leave the roots in the ground where they are. As the roots decompose, they add valuable organic matter to the soil and help feed the soil food web
While this is an effective way to manage annual weeds, it will not work for perennial weeds that grow from rhizomes (such as cowpea) or those that regenerate from root fragments (such as common mallow).
4. Stop turning over your soil.
Every time you turn or disturb the soil (by plowing, digging, or deep raking), you stir up dormant weed seeds. Once they come to the surface and are exposed to sunlight and moisture, they have everything they need to germinate and grow.
This is why I’m a fan of no-till gardening: not only does it let dormant weeds lie, but it’s a lot less work. So if you don’t have to dig, simply spread a few inches of compost over the soil and make the minimum planting trench or planting hole you need.
5. Mulch, mulch, mulch.
Here’s the thing about soil: If you don’t cover it with something, nature will take over and cover it with whatever blows in. So don’t leave your dirt bare!
Spread a layer of straw, wood chips, fall leaves, compost (yes, it’s mulch), or any of these organic mulch options over bare soil to suppress weeds and reduce soil-borne diseases.
All those other weeds you just pulled out of the ground? If they haven’t gone to seed, you can simply throw them on the ground and turn them into mulch. (I do this even with the stems that I prune from my tomato plants—they go right next to the plants instead of a dedicated compost pile.)
6. Plant your garden beds intensively.
The more space your desired plants take up, the less space there is for weeds to grow and develop. So if you don’t want to mulch your beds, use the plants themselves as ‘living mulch’ to cover the empty spaces in between.
When crops are planted intensivelythey compete with weeds as well as shade the soil and help retain moisture. But it’s not just a matter of placing your plants closer together. Intensive planting can also mean strategic replanting.
For example, you can plant a low-growing crop (say, trailing watercress) as a living mulch around a taller crop (tomatoes). In this example, naturtiums it works as a trap crop to attract aphids away from your precious tomato crop and their nectar-rich flowers also attract beneficial insects.
Or, you can grow dense patches heat resistant lettuce under a cucumber trellis. The lettuce helps suppress weeds while the cucumber vines give the lettuce some afternoon shade delay their closure.
7. Don’t let the weeds sow.
This is one of the easiest ways to manage weeds in your garden: Don’t let them seed! Otherwise, you’ll end up with hundreds (if not thousands) of weed volunteers next year.
If a weed has already formed seeds, carefully cut off the seed head and put the seeds or the whole plant in the trash (or somewhere else in the yard where you don’t mind weeds). Avoid poking or mowing weeds in an area where weeds have already gone to seed, as you will end up spreading the seeds far and wide.
8. Do not compost weeds that have gone to seed.
I always recommend throwing weeds with the seed heads in the trash because most compost piles don’t get hot enough to destroy the weed seeds.
To effectively break down organic matter, including seeds, a compost pile must reach an internal temperature of 140°F. It must also be rotated regularly so that the cooler outer materials (where seeds may be present) are moved to the center where it is warmer.
Most people, however, keep cool compost piles where the seeds can sometimes still germinate. So if that’s you, skip the headache and toss your weed seeds in the trash or your municipal yard waste bin.
9. Never leave your garden beds empty at the end of the season.
Garden beds should be covered with something all year round. If your crops are finished for the season, grow a winter cover crop in their place. If you don’t want to grow anything else, add some mulch on top (which can be a few inches of compost, a thick layer of straw, or even a pile of the old plants you just cut).
That way, when you’re ready to plant again next season, you’ve already added good organic matter to the soil and aren’t fighting weeds that have sprung up over the fall and winter.
