How Does Your Garden Grow?

The extreme case of the lazy gardener might be the college professor who planted his entire vegetable patch in spring and never looked at it again until it was time to harvest. He overplanted and just let the whole business go weedy. He got enough food for the family out of the enterprise, and that was all he was after in the first place.

Most of us aren’t that lazy. We take pride in order and control. The specter of carefully planned and planted crops being choked by weeds makes us shiver. We dream of lush crops and flamboyant flowers with few weeds, but we’d like to be able to reach that goal without accepting slavery. So we compromise and let a few weeds grow, or take a different tack and smother them with mulch.

Beat the Weeds

The secret to weed control, say knowledgeable gardeners, is to get them while they’re little. Begin cultivation as soon as weeds appear. It’s light work to knock them down then; later, when they’re firmly rooted and threatening to take over the garden, eliminating them is hard work.

Peter Henderson wrote this, and it still applies today: “In no work in which men are engaged is the adage, ‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ more applicable than to the work of the farm or garden. The instant that weeds appear, attack them with the hoe or rake. Do not wait for them to get a foot high, or a twelfth part of it, but break every inch of the surface crust of the ground just as soon as a germ of weed growth shows itself. And it wine better to do it even before any weeds show, for by using a small, sharp steel rake, two or three days after your crop is planted or sown, you will kill the weeds just as they are germinating.”

“Limit the time you spend weeding and develop a routine,” suggests Phil Viereck. “It’s a favorite morning ritual for me. I take a sharp wide hoe and spend twenty minutes each morning cultivating. I do the garden in pieces. Twenty minutes of a garden a day is so much better than three hours occasionally.”

Want to sail (play golf or tennis, hike, bike, lie in a hammock) in July and August? Weed now and sail later. Skip spring weeding and you’ll pay all summer. Kit Foster says, “We put in lots of time weeding in spring and the rest of the summer we weed just one day a week.”

“Some people get concerned if there’s a weed here and there,” says Ray Lambert. “I don’t as long as they don’t take over the plants. They’re part of the garden. I practice walk-through-weeding in my raised-bed garden. Whenever I walk through, I pull a few of the most insidious weeds.”

After a good rain, when the soil is soft and weed roots give little resistance, is the best time to weed. Let foliage dry first, to avoid spreading disease.

An experienced gardener says, “A crop like peas we don’t bother to weed much. By the time the weeds are big enough to bother the peas, the harvest is over.”

If weeding isn’t your favorite outdoor sport, do what a Charlotte, Vermont, gardener does. “I weed thoroughly and often early in the season, so the vegetables, even the tiny carrots, get a good start. Then, about July 15, when most vegetables are well up, I wish them well, and tell them they’re on their own. By that time they’re growing ahead of the weeds, and the few weeds that do come up don’t interfere with their growth.” If he plants fall crops, a late row of lettuce, for example, he’ll weed that carefully, just as if it had been started in the spring.

Carry a pair of pliers as part of your weeding arsenal. Use them to pull out tough weeds, like tree seedlings, that won’t succomb to a gentle jerk of the hand.

Another handy tool is a dandelion-weeder or daisy grubber — good for tap-rooted plants that can’t be pulled easily by hand.

Try a hula hoe or scuffle hoe. Drag it through the garden, and it cuts weeds below the surface of the soil, at the growing point.

“When I weed a flower garden,” says Nora Stevenson, “I never cart the weeds off in a wheelbarrow. All those weeds are just green manure, a source of humus.’ I tuck them in the back, behind the flowers, thinly, so they don’t mold before they begin to disintegrate.”

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