digitS'
Garden Master
Put your emphasis on how you will keep the weeds from returning for the first year or so, XtreemLee. You don't want them overwhelmingly your veggies. Set things up to make weeding as quick and easy as possible. It's a big garden.
Perennial weeds like quackgrass and bindweed will be right back after a tilling. You have to stop every piece of their roots from growing until you are rid of them.
Even then, they can come back! One university report I was reading said that bindweed seed can lie dormant in a field for over 25 years and still be viable. By the way, I didn't have bindweed show up in one garden I had until I brought in a truckload of cow manure. The plants, apparently, had been growing in the corral.
The seedlings are not hard to kill. Annual weeds like lambsquarters are not hard to kill ... in the first few weeks after the seeds germinate. They become progressively more difficult to take out as time goes by. Leave that perennial bindweed seedling long enough and it will store enuf energy in those tuff to kill roots that tilling will just break and scatter them so that they multiply.
I can say that I much prefer having my gardens in beds but I would not do that unless I had some clear idea of what the weed situation would be on my new, "70' by 100'" garden.
Here is Wishing You a great season and continuing success!
Steve
Perennial weeds like quackgrass and bindweed will be right back after a tilling. You have to stop every piece of their roots from growing until you are rid of them.
Even then, they can come back! One university report I was reading said that bindweed seed can lie dormant in a field for over 25 years and still be viable. By the way, I didn't have bindweed show up in one garden I had until I brought in a truckload of cow manure. The plants, apparently, had been growing in the corral.
The seedlings are not hard to kill. Annual weeds like lambsquarters are not hard to kill ... in the first few weeks after the seeds germinate. They become progressively more difficult to take out as time goes by. Leave that perennial bindweed seedling long enough and it will store enuf energy in those tuff to kill roots that tilling will just break and scatter them so that they multiply.
I can say that I much prefer having my gardens in beds but I would not do that unless I had some clear idea of what the weed situation would be on my new, "70' by 100'" garden.
Here is Wishing You a great season and continuing success!
Steve