Here is an important one if your garden is an after-work thing. Committing non-random acts of plant destruction (especially if they involve a pick and shovel, and wrenching roots from the ground) can be very cathartic, but we do have to go out and earn money to pay for taxes and cat food. The above is a nearby yard, just to illustrate our diverse weed population.
Dense planting (as I'm going to have to do for the milliacres) is one strategy. John Jeavon's classic, How to Grow More Vegetables... has great ideas about spacing plants in beds so that their leaves barely touch at maturity, shading the ground. Then less weeds can grow.
Here in the South, though, stronger measures are necessary. My husband favors dosing the front yard with Round-up as a pre-emergent herbicide, but I'm concerned about not inhibiting my cyclin-dependent kinases (Biol Sci, J Marc, et al, April 2004, 96(3), 245-9), which are critical for cell division to work properly. So it ain't touchin' the back yard. What do I do?
Mulch. Lots of it. Black mulch can help warm the soil early in the season. Light-colored mulch can help keep it cool later. Both kinds, with a hefty layer of wet newspaper underneath, block the sun and keep weeds from germinating, leaving the work-weary evening gardener to cherish a few moments to pick tomatoes and beans without dealing with the @##!! poison ivy. A few brave dandelions and violets worked their way upward last year, but mulching helped a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment