DO THESE THINGS TO ELIMINATE WEEDS IN THE GARDEN!

hey you guys this is josh with homesteading family and today we're going to be talking weeds specifically six steps you can take to control and eliminate weeds in your garden [Music] all right so it is august here in north idaho and it is generally weed season for us and wherever you're at there's a time of the year where it usually heats up it dries out a little bit and the weeds really get cranking and it gets hard to control for some reason this time of year the weeds are really going harvest is starting to come in half into water more and it gets hard to keep up with the weeds and the conditions that uh you know that they like really abound right now and so this is the time when it can be really hard to keep up so i've got some strategies for you some that are long term that you might have to plan in the next year some that you can apply right now but that will really help you control and even eliminate a lot of your weeds and um before we get into those though let's talk a few minutes about what are weeds right everybody's got a different idea and in general aside from specific varieties weeds are anything that you don't want growing in your garden or in your space anything that's competing or getting in the way of what you're trying to grow for us that's we've got purslane um we've got bindweed we've got horsetail we've got mallows lambsquarter those are a lot of the common ones you're going to have different ones in your area but whatever they are they're generally something right that that you don't want in your garden you don't want it competing with your vegetables but here's the deal weeds are a natural part of the system of the natural system they're there they have a function and so before we talk about eliminating we really want to understand why are they there what are they doing and they're really god's way in creation of taking care of damaged soil of a damaged environment weeds are generally annuals that are coming up they come up in harsh conditions when it's hot when it's dry and they're there to restore the system they're they're they're hardy and they're tough and they're a problem for us because they're competitive they're able to survive in the worst conditions and they're coming up because they're trying to cover the ground they're trying to protect the soil they're bringing up nutrients and actually dying back every year in the natural system and slowly building topsoil so they have a real purpose in the natural system but in our gardens they often we don't see them as having any purpose they're a problem and so we want to turn this problem into a solution so i've got six six can i count on my fingers uh six methods that will really help you reduce them eliminate a lot of them and over time the first year you could reduce your weeds by 50 to 75 percent and over a few years by 90 to where it's really a light weed load but it takes some forward thinking it takes some uh long-term strategies along with day-to-day work so let's dive into those now all right so method number one is a long-term strategy and it's gonna change the way you garden if you're not doing this already and that is to go to a low or even better no-till system you gotta stop turning your soil over every year every bit of soil has got seed in it and it goes down into the layers it's got those weed seeds they're there they're waiting for the right conditions to pop up and so every time we turn them over you're bringing new seeds to the top so if you're tilling your garden every year you may have eliminated all the weeds the year before however you've done it but then you go and you turn that soil over and you're bringing those seeds back to the top and they're going to be there and they're going to germinate when the conditions are right and so you want to go to a no-till system like we've done here we've got these 30-inch raised beds now last year was our first year on this property and the soil was very compact and it had very low organic matter in it so that was definitely a time for tilling for loosening up the soil for turning in some organic matter to get things started and we had a lot of weeds but this year having not tilled everything having just covered the beds last year with compost and mulch which we'll get to in a minute having not turned the soil over this year just that fact alone reduced our weeds at least 50 percent and then the mulching which we'll get into a minute added to that but just doing that alone we're not bringing new seeds to the top okay it's also extremely beneficial for your soil ecology and your garden to be building soil up and building topsoil not constantly turning it in so that's strategy number one you got to stop turning your soil every year because you're just working against yourself you're working against the natural system by continually bringing those seeds to the surface where they're ready to germinate when the conditions are right number two and these are an order of importance all right you're going to stop tilling next thing you need to do is mulch your soil cover your soil everywhere in nature except for a desert you're going to see that natural systems cover the soil they don't leave bare dirt whether it's the prairies with grasses laying down or dying or the forests that are dropping leaf litter on the ground it is always covering the soil building topsoil that's the way nature works and that's what we want to try to mimic in the garden and so i left a patch here for you guys as an example if you see here on the left this is a row of thick weeds and i left bare ground this year i did not cover it i did not do anything to it and you can see it's filled in and that's what nature does that's actually good that's the natural system at work and it is restoring the soil it's bringing up nutrients it's creating organic matter where this would die back and would actually create a mulch and be improving the soil over time but we we don't want this in the garden right this is going to get in here and compete with things i've got blind weed growing up the the sides of the tunnel here and a bunch of stuff is about to go to seed so i'm going to cut all this down and we'll talk about that and again in a few minutes but look over to the left side and you can see where in this raised bed where we mulched i did not till this bed this year last year i put it to rest we put compost on it and we mulched it and it's been sitting here ever since and we just planted the corn and look at that difference down the road i mean that's really a 95 percent difference there are a few weeds coming in there and i have pulled a couple out over the season but that's a 90 to 95 percent difference just by not tilling and mulching the soil so right there look what you've eliminated in your workload and in the competition and your problem with weeds just applying these two things okay so strategy number three is to plant densely and quickly so you can see in this row right here we've got carrots three rows of carrots as a primary crop and then we've planted some cilantro in here in the middle and some spinach in the middle that we're going to start to harvest out as the carrots mature and so we're actually using that natural system of covering the ground to out-compete the weeds in this case so this bed was planted late we didn't plant this until um gosh almost july and so it was one of the raised beds we hadn't tilled it we had left it mulched and when it came time to plant we pulled the mulch aside into the rows and planted our seed kept it well watered so that everything would get up quickly and so we have several forces at work first we didn't till the soil over second we kept it mulched in that early season where some of those early season weeds come up so they just didn't come up and then we got a crop in here and we got it planted very densely and so that out competes the weeds there have been a few in here and there's a couple i saw as i was walking through and i'll pull them out but again we've reduced the weed load here by 90 percent i've had to do very little work in this bed and so you can take you can do some research on companion planting and look how you can combine crops uh to plant them very close together and actually create a living cover of things you want to harvest to outcompete the weeds okay so strategy number four is very similar but that is cover cropping that's going crop growing crops that aren't necessarily your harvest crops but crops that you're going to grow to cover the soil and create some beneficial elements so one of those would be growing those in place so that if you've got a dormant bed or you're between plantings or it's early spring or late fall going into winter and you want to create a living mulch you can grow a cover crop something like peas and oats if you want to look that up that's a whole discussion but you can grow that as a cover crop and that will take the place of the weeds those will grow up quickly they'll shade the soil and they'll slow down the conditions and out compete the weeds and along with that you're actually building organic material and bringing nitrogen to your soil so you're you're create you're combining a whole lot of functions there and that is a great strategy for between crops or for depending on your season you know ending the season once you've harvested and you can put those cover crops in let them die back for the winter and prepare for spring so cover cropping that's strategy number four and a great way to intermittently deal with weeds okay so those first four strategies are really your bigger long-term strategies and particularly those first three are going to do the bulk of the work for you to where you haven't we've eliminated anywhere from 75 to 90 of the weeds and you haven't even gotten out there and had to start weeding yet i just think that's really cool i don't know about you but that saves me a lot of time in the garden but weeds are still going to come up we're not going to get rid of them completely we're going to work in the soil we're going to stir it up sometimes wind's going to blow things in and some things are just very persistent depending on what what you've got growing and they come up anyways things happen so you're still going to get some and so the next strategy is a daily strategy and that is just getting yourself out into the garden every day and harvesting the weeds pulling them when they're small when they're easy to get out they're easy to pull up by the root we don't want to just cut them off we want to pull the whole thing out i'm going to get this purslane pull it all the way out and of course some of the other strategies we're talking about leaves for a nice tilt and a nice soil so you see that that everything here is coming out really easily and i've got my garden works scheduled so that in this this main crop garden's a little under a quarter acre and in seven days i can have covered the thing the whole thing a few minutes every day just coming through doing a couple rows a day i won't leave that guy that's a little charred coming up and just pulling the weeds you can see this one i miss but if you get to the whole thing about every seven days it's just not very much work and while you're out here you're you're examining your crops you're looking at what's happening you can see here we need the water it's a little dry on top and so it's it's about time to get some water on here so that helps me remember that i need to get watering it helps me check for bugs or any problems a lot of times this chard when it gets in contact with the ground gets a little fungus so this reminds me i want to get out here and start to trim up some of the leaves on the charge so that it's growing more uprightly so that's strategy number five right is just getting out into the garden daily having a plan and pulling your weeds not cutting them off a lot of them are going to come right back from the root so get them when they're small pull them all the way out and it's a very easy job it's very relaxing doesn't take a lot of time and you're getting your eyes on the soil or on the garden you're getting your hands in the soil and it's just it's a nice time to be out there all right so method number six which is what i call chop and drop and that is when the weeds just get ahead of you i've allowed this here to happen intentionally this whole strip to demonstrate what happens when you don't cover the soil so we're going to apply the chop and drop here but it does happen i've got some other areas in the garden sometimes you just miss weeds this area like the corn certain things get going up in there you don't see them you come through and then one day you go whoa where'd that come from you've got some big plants going this is actually a cultivated amaranth but we've got a lot of wild amaranth you start see it's going to seed and you're going oh man i don't want that to go to seed and so you don't need to stress you don't need to worry you can just come in and cut them down now this row here i'm going to come in and weed whack but for sake of demonstration there's a lot of things in here that are flowering and they're going to seed i just want to get them before they go to seed and so you can just come through and start to cut everything out and it's a big area you know it's a lot of work if it's an area like this but again if we've done all our other work and we haven't allowed this to happen just by not tilling then um you're going to have a lot less work and let's look at an area like that so here's another area that i let go weeds have gotten big a lot of times you know this is in the path a lot of times it's happening in the middle of your plants you don't want to just pull them up here it's not a problem in the pathway so i could just pull this grass up again because the way we're treating the soil and mulching it comes up very easily but if it's mixed in with your plants you can just come and take these and cut them down and cut them up it's not going to seed yet it's getting close but it's not there and you can mulch with it and i've done it with areas like we were just at where we've cut the whole area down and it actually creates a mulch if you haven't gotten the mulching so you can you can take all this organic material that nature is growing for you and actually turn it into a mulch or into a compost now here's the one caveat if they do get away from you and they're starting to go to seed and you're not sure you're going to cut them down you're not going to pull them up if they're near your plant so they're not not disturbing the root structure of your vegetables cut them down if you if you're worried about the seeds have gotten too mature then eliminate them take them out and either burn them or learn how to thermal compost where you can heat it up enough that it will render the seeds and viable and they won't re-sprout so that's method number six that's chop and drop you apply those six things learning that account here um you you're drastically going to reduce your load work on weeding and you're going to eliminate a lot of the weeds and you do this for a few years in a row we're only at year two here and we've seen at least a 75 percent decrease year three and four it's going to be even less okay so those are the core strategies that i use throughout the season and within my garden that eliminate a lot of the weeds and help me control the ones that do come up but you may not be right in the middle of a system like this it might take you time to develop one you may have some things that are really hard to control so there are a few other strategies that i want to talk about i can't demonstrate them but you can take your garden rows one strategy is to cover them before you plant your crops several weeks before you're going to plant your crop and cover your rose in a black plastic or tarp or landscape cloth and what that's going to do is it's going to heat things up and you can even do this early in the season because it will warm the soil up it will cause all of those seeds near the surface to germinate and sprout but then by leaving them there it's going to overheat them it's going to smother them and it's going to kill them so a lot of market gardeners use that strategy it's a great way to go if you've got if you know you've got a large infestation you're trying to get ahead of it before you get your crop in that can be a great strategy that's to prevent them before the season gets going another one if they get up and going you could use the tarps to smother them once they're already up and going you can kill them that way depending on how much time you have if you don't have a lot of time you can also come in and burn them with a propane or a butane torch and burn them in place and and then move forward with your garden season so those are two other great strategies now i realize that i have not talked about weeding tools and hose and an innumerable amount of different types of tools for weeding i just don't use them very much with the system that i apply i don't need them all these things that if i explain to you i rarely need to get a hoe out i rarely need to get a cultivator out i just don't need them so yes there's a lot of good tools that are out there that are good for weeding most of them cut the weeds off i want to either stop them from growing or i want to pull them out when they're very very small because when you cut them off if you just hoe them most of them are going to come right back they've got a root structure and you're going to continue to fight with them so they're out there but that's why i'm not talking about them or demonstrating them here they are very very last resort i rarely use them okay so that's it guys if you apply those six methods you're going to make weeding just you're going to about eliminate it and make it really really easy and make your garden much more enjoyable remember we're always trying to mimic natural systems work with natural systems so when we understand what weeds are how the soil works how the natural system works we can work to mimic that and we start to turn problems into solutions hope you guys have a great rest of your garden season great harvest season i'll see you soon

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 75,724

Keywords: Homesteading, Self-Sufficiency, Permaculture, Homesteading Family, weed control, kill weeds, how to kill weeds, garden weeds, kill weeds naturally, removing weeds, easy weeding, how to get rid of weeds in flower beds, how to kill weeds in flower beds, weed free garden, weed free, weed control in garden, weed control and fertilization, weed control in vegetable garden, weed control in mulch beds, weed control in summer, removing weeds from garden, kill weeds permanently

Id: 3oTLjL_lsys

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020