Weed Killer in Vegetable Gardens
Without the use of weed killers, your vegetable garden can be free of weeds. Among the keys to weedless gardening are avoiding tilling, using a drip-irrigation system, mulching and maintaining permanent planting areas. Spraying household vinegar on weeds also inhibits their growth. Other effective techniques include using newspapers as a base for your mulch and scrap carpeting for pathways through your vegetable garden. As a last resort, a hand-held flamer is recommended. Does this Spark an idea?
Other People Are Reading
-
Expert Insight
-
Lee Reich, author of "Weedless Gardening," says he follows four rules to keep his vegetable garden free of weeds:
1. He never tills or disturbs the soil so that dormant weed seeds will not be exposed to light and air and, thus, come to life.
2. He designates permanent areas for walking and planting to avoid compaction and the need for tillage.
3. He maintains a thin mulch of weed-free organic material to snuff out any weed seeds that blow in or are dropped into the garden by birds.
4. He uses drip irrigation whenever watering is needed to avoid encouraging weed growth in paths and between widely spaced plants. He slowly drips water onto the crop's root zone. Besides inhibiting weed growth, drip systems can reach 95 percent application efficiency and save up to 75 percent of the water used by sprinkler systems, says Reich. Installation kits for drip irrigation systems may be found at garden centers, hardware stores and home-improvement stores. A landscape professional should be consulted for larger systems.
Mulching Matters
-
Mulch materials from your yard can be used in your vegetable garden. Grass clippings and leaves need to be dry and free of weeds. If the lawn has been treated with weed killer within the last two mowings, those lawn clippings should not be used. Otherwise, your vegetables may wilt overnight.
To deprive weed seeds of the light they need to germinate and grow, mulch should be more than 2 inches thick. For both vegetable and flower gardens, wheat straw is a good choice, since it has fewer weed seeds than hay.
Soil should be covered with four to six sheets of newspaper when weeds are abundant. Then the newspapers should be covered with 2 to 3 inches of organic mulch.
-
Cover Crops
-
Growing cover crops is another way to smother weeds in your vegetable garden. As living mulches, cover crops protect and improve the soil with humus and nitrogen.
Cover crops may be planted at the end of summer and again in early fall. Examples include oats, peas and barley. By the end of winter, the stems and leaves may be raked on top of the soil. Dead roots and their channel systems may be left intact.
Weeding Ways
-
In addition to manually yanking out weeds, maintaining at least a ½-foot-wide swath of bare soil around the edges of your vegetable garden is another way to protect your vegetables from encroaching weeds. Scrap carpeting may be installed around your garden and along pathways between rows to suppress weeds. When a group of weed seedlings sprout, the daily (or frequent) use of a hoe also will eradicate the small seedlings.
Homemade Herbicide
-
Spraying household vinegar on invasive weeds will kill most of them. When stubborn weeds resprout new leaves after a vinegar bath, the leaves may be eradicated with several applications of more vinegar spray. Eventually, the weed will starve to death.
To increase vinegar's ability to spread and stick to leaves, 1 tablespoon of dish detergent and 2 tablespoons of canola oil may be added to each gallon of vinegar. Vinegar is most effective against grasses when temperatures are above 70 degrees. When the weather warms but it's still early in the season, weeds may be sprayed weekly, then biweekly or monthly as summer progresses.
U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers have found that vinegar kills 80 to 100 percent of several major weed species. Using concentrations of 5 and 10 percent, researchers found that both killed weeds less than two weeks old. However, older weeds required higher vinegar concentrations of 20 percent. (Household vinegar is around 5 percent.)
Flame Them
-
Researchers at the Organic Farming Research Foundation and Purdue University have found the most effective method for control of tougher weeds is to use a LP gas hand-held flamer. They tested four organic weed-control sprays in addition to flaming weeds with a hand-held flamer.
Researchers tested Burnout II (with acetic acid), Matran 5 (with clove and other oils), 10 percent vinegar solution, 13 percent vinegar solution and the flamer. They were focused particularly on controlling chickweed, purslane, galinsoga and grasses.
Organic sprays did not turn out to be the best solution. While Burnout II reduced the weeding time the most overall, the hand-held flamer was more convenient and more effective in controlling the tougher weeds. Matran 5 was the next most effective weed killer. All of the treatments worked best if the weeds were treated when less than 4 inches tall.
-
References
- Photo Credit got weeds? image by SSGuess from Fotolia.com
