Green Garden, 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.”

A Few Final Weed-Beating Ideas

If weeds are growing around the perimeter of your garden, scattering seeds into the garden, cut those weeds with a scythe, then add them to the compost pile. The scythe is a remarkable and efficient tool in the hands of an expert. An able hand doesn’t flail at the weeds with the scythe. He holds it loosely, comfortably, and moves the blade by pivoting his body, keeping the blade parallel to and close to the ground. He stops often to sharpen the blade. The scythe doesn’t actually get dull that quickly, but frequent sharpening is a good way to relax shoulder and arm muscles.

Weeds in perennial flower beds are the gardener’s nemesis. How do you enrich the soil and mulch it without introducing weed seeds? “I have a new system, which works,” says Closey Dickey. “Never, never again will I add horse manure, and I’m loath even to use compost. Instead, I topdress every fall with a mixture of peat moss, bone meal, dried cow manure [no weed seeds], and churned-up leaves.”

Weeds are always a nuisance among onions and garlic. A fine, weed-free mulch, such as peat moss or grass clippings, applied soon after planting will lick the problem. You’ll have less area to mulch if you plant them in wide rows or square beds.

Can’t be bothered with mulches?

One gardener sets his lawnmower high and mows weekly between his garden rows, forming weed paths between the vegetables.

Another says, “To have a good garden, you have to get down on your knees once in a while. Recently, I’ve found it pretty difficult to do that. [The speaker is in his mid-eighties. So I leave four feet between rows and use my rototiller regularly to maintain a dust mulch and keep weeds down. It’s a waste of land, but it makes it possible for me to keep a garden.

To lick weeds, concentrate for just one year. This approach works particularly well on areas that haven’t been gardened before, but may be full of weed seeds. In the spring, till, then plant buckwheat at the rate of four pounds per thousand square feet. This is heavy seeding. After it has blossomed, but before the dark seeds form, till the buckwheat under. A day later, plant another crop of buckwheat, again four pounds per thousand square feet. Again, the buckwheat will come up, and so, too, will the weeds, but the buckwheat again will outgrow and eventually kill off the weeds by shading them out. This time, be particularly sure the seed hasn’t formed before you till it, or the buckwheat will be the weed you’re faced with next year.

After tilling in the second crop of buckwheat, plant another cover crop, such as annual ryegrass or winter rye. The result will be three cover crops tilled into the soil, enriching it, plus almost all the weeds eliminated from the site. This is an excellent method to use before raising strawberries, since weeds are what usually do in a bed of them.

Has your soil been poisoned with herbicides? This could be the case on a lawn that you now want to turn into a flower or vegetable garden. It could take as long as five years for the residue to dissipate. You can speed the process by adding extra organic matter to the soil and deep-watering to wash residues away. If the contamination is bad, you may want to mix activated charcoal with the soil, at a rate of 300 pounds per acre.

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