Easy Organic Weed Control With Newspaper & Mulch - AnOregonCottage.com

one of the ways to have beautiful flower beds without constant weeding is to use a combination of paper and mulch to keep weeds down long term the paper that we used mostly for our garden beds is newspaper regular newspaper but without the colored ads you just want to toss those and for areas where we want nothing to grow no other plants or anything we use cardboard that we've collected through the year the thing I really like best about this is you can put mulch down and it will suppress some weeds but if you use the paper first you're not going to have hardly any weeds and it builds up over time the more that you do it the less weeds you'll have my favorite mulch to use is this garden compost basic garden compost we get at our local landscape center there's no guarantee that it's organic so I just use it on our flowerbeds around our house and I get a different one for our vegetable beds but this works great it's economical I like it that it is dark like really rich dirt and it feeds the soil as it breaks down which is different than just a pine bark mulch the first thing that you're going to want to do is to weed now you don't have to get all the weeds out which is one of the benefits of this thing but you do have to get big big weeds I've already pulled these but Sicily dandelions anything that's a big perennial weed and anything that will stick up and make the paper get up but anything that's just flat and laying down there you can keep it there unless it's at the edge and you want a clean edge this is the part that I really like the paper mulch technique for this is one of my weed nemesis's it's a violet and it just grows and there's no way no amount of digging is going to make it disappear so I can keep it under control by covering it with a heavy layer of newspaper and then mulch on depending on where you're laying this I'm not going to plant anything here so I'm gonna do really thick like good for these are just one page thick so these aren't very thick newspapers so I'm gonna just lay it in there like that because I want it to cover it all that all the violet this paper is a little bit thicker so I can just lay that and you want to cover you don't want anything showing any ground that is left to show will grow weeds through the mulch so your goal is to cover it what we really like is the Wall Street Journal it's got nice wide paper there's a lot of pages to each section so it covers well but there's a problem with the journal because while you're laying the papers out you'll see some incredibly interesting article and you'll have to either stop and read it or you set it aside you have a pile to set aside to read it later for instance here's a piece on how airline seats have been shrinking over the years I knew that was happening if it's windy like it is today you just want to have your hose nearby and as soon as you lay a number of pieces you're gonna soak it that'll keep it from blowing away while you go and get your mulch to lay on so when you're laying it on you want to lay it as thick as you can you don't want a newspaper to start showing right away so a good two to three inches thick is best if you have a more room you can use a garden fork otherwise I just use my gloved hand spread it close to the base of the plants but not up to don't smother the base of the plants you just want to make sure you cover all the newspaper showing right up to the edge for areas that I want a lot of heavy weed suppression for even two years if I can get it I like to use cardboard it's the same technique you just lay it down wet it cover it much we're not going to lie to you it's a couple weekends of really hard work once a year but when that's done all this left to do is sit back and enjoy

Channel: AnOregonCottage

Views: 533,779

Keywords: organic weed control, compost, garden mulch, ground cover, newspaper recycling, Garden, Weed Control, Mulch

Id: H3Mc75MxR3M

Length: 4min 48sec (288 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 28 2014