Weed love a little help

[Dirtmechanic]

I am definitely going to give this a try! I found some cheat grass growing there too

My elderly neighbor (94) was very excited to tell me that when his gardener took up the strips of black weed cloth he had them install last year that nothing was left under them. Around here that means nutsedge too.

 

[peteyfoozer]

Progress report:
We have gone from this

To this:

There’s a lot to be done but it’s an encouraging beginning

 

[baymule]

I see Fen was helping too! Looks fabulous, lots of hard work in that.

 

[flowerbug]

My elderly neighbor (94) was very excited to tell me that when his gardener took up the strips of black weed cloth he had them install last year that nothing was left under them. Around here that means nutsedge too.

it takes me about three seasons to remove nutsedge manually. not fun, but oh well, i've been through worse.

 

[Dirtmechanic]

it takes me about three seasons to remove nutsedge manually. not fun, but oh well, i've been through worse.

They orginally covered the pathways and right up to the plants which really minimized weeding and they left it through winter and green up.

 

[flowerbug]

...
There’s a lot to be done but it’s an encouraging beginningView attachment 56912

looking great!

 

[peteyfoozer]

I see Fen was helping too! Looks fabulous, lots of hard work in that.

Fen is in charge of stick management

 

[baymule]

I had an Australian Shepherd that helped me garden. I’d pull weeds, toss ‘em and she fetched them right back to me.

 

[ducks4you]

GS's don't do that. Eva looks at me and wonders why ANYBODY would eat those things.

 

[flowerbug]

Reviving a neglected garden sounds like a rewarding project. As for dealing with the overgrown vine and berries, perhaps trimming back the excess growth with your electric hedge trimmer could help.

anytime you can remove the energy gathering parts of a weed you are decreasing it's ability to procreate and spread further. the more times you can do this the better it will be for the surrounding gardens. if you can remove things before they drop more seeds that is the major improvement, but for some weeds it may take many years before you can exhaust their seed supply from the soil seed bank.

one way i do decrease the soil seed bank of any more recently dropped seeds is to dig a deep hole and scrape the surface layer of the soil into that hole, put a few layers of cardboard or newspaper over it and then bury it again. those seeds are then sequestered down deep enough that they will not be able to germinate as long as they are not disturbed again.

often i do not dig that deeply so this method works great here even for limiting crab grass, but there is the issue that in digging a deep hole you are disturbing the area again and you will get some sprouts from that which you would not have gotten before had you left it alone.

if i had a lot of room i would set up a solar oven big enough to bake any deeply disturbed soils and then that would fry any remaining seeds so they could not sprout. but i don't have that kind of space or inclination and am happy with how things have been going otherwise...