Weed Plant Bedding, Try Black Plastic

“Black plastic has freed me from hours of weeding. I never used to finish that chore,” explains a Massachusetts gardener. “I resisted black plastic because it looks so awful, but we put dirt along the edges and scatter some on top, and that helps. We use three‑foot-wide rolls in our entire vegetable garden. We plant a row, lay the plastic, anchor the edges with dirt, plant another row, and so on. The weeding always had hung over me. Now I just hand-weed in the row itself, and we have more time to canoe or play tennis.”

Do your muskmelons sometimes taste like squash? For increased sweetness, plant through black plastic. It will heat up the soil several degrees, and that often makes the difference between tasteless and first-rate melons.

“I can’t bear to put holes in my beautiful 6-mil black plastic,” says one lazy gardener. In April, she rototills, fertilizes, and digs organic matter into the plot where she plans to plant heat-loving crops. She lays large sheets of 6-mil black plastic over the soil and leaves them to kill weeds and heat soil until planting time in late May or early June. She lifts the plastic and carefully stores it, whole instead of holey, until next year; then she plants melons, cucumbers, and other heat-loving crops in warm, weedless soil, and lays “cheap black plastic” ( 1.5 mil) around them for continuing easy maintenance.

Warning: If you have snakes in your area, they may find the black plastic and crawl under it. They love the extra heat there.

The Weed-Free Asparagus Bed

“Please, please tell me how to keep weeds out of the asparagus patch,” pleaded one frustrated gardener.

“My Dad had the ideal solution for weeds in his asparagus patch,” a grower explains. “He built a fence around the bed, and after the harvest, when the spears had grown up tall and lacy, let his chickens loose inside the fence. They ate all the weeds, kept the asparagus beetle under control, and fertilized the soil with their droppings.”

Plant annual ryegrass in the asparagus bed after the last harvest in spring. It crowds out other weeds in summer, and dies in the winter. Next spring you’ll have mulch already in place, and it won’t interfere with emerging spears.

Cultivate the patch in early spring, two or three weeks before spears emerge, weed once after cutting, and mulch heavily for the rest of summer. One gardener saves his grass clippings for mulch, since they’re weed-free.

The Ruth Stout way is to keep the asparagus bed heavily mulched. Each fall, add eight inches of loose hay. In winter, broadcast cottonseed meal and wood ashes on the mulch. The soil warms more slowly in spring, but the hay also protects the asparagus from tip-kill by late frosts. If you can’t wait for those delectable spears, push the mulch aside in spring. Or split the harvest, by removing mulch from half the bed for an early crop.

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