NEVER pull a Garden Weed AGAIN! This ONE THING makes it possible!

hey everybody welcome back to our homestead we have been so excited to learn that there is a new interest in gardening and raising your own food since all this craziness has been going on in the world we think that's so fantastic and we want to share with you a ton of encouragement because we have gone through some ups and downs with gardening along the way we've made a ton of mistakes but we have also discovered a way to garden that is so easy way better than we ever did in the beginning and we're excited to share with you so that it can be an easy and fun wonderful experience when we first moved to the Missouri Ozarks about four years ago one of the very first things we did was put a garden in our homestead now we've been gardening for a long time we had an urban homestead in the Phoenix area and we garden there and we were pretty successful at gardening especially for the desert but when we moved to southern Missouri we had no idea what we were getting into things here just grow so well it's like we have super weeds around here so the first year we just did gardening like we always do to start our garden we put down a layer of cardboard we covered it with manure and straw and all kinds of things to really make a nice surface to grow on and it looked so great we thought this is gonna be amazing it's gonna be just like the garden that we had in Phoenix and you know we're just gonna do so much better than everybody else by growing completely weed free we were pretty much using the back to Eden growing method within about a month we had weeds and we were picking them thinking oh we've got on the surface they'll come right out but then a month later we had these super gigantic weeds that would come up in like no time right there was no way we could keep up with all of them and so we just basically gave up on picking weeds and we're hopeful that we would get any kind of harvest at all right and that led us down a road to start researching other ways to garden that would make things easier we started watching a ton of YouTube videos to find out what ways were working for other people and it seemed like really there were only two things that people were doing maybe three first of all a lot of people were doing the back to Eden garden method and some really liked it and some didn't like it but they were doing it anyway because they didn't know what else to do and then there were those people that were doing just a more traditional way of gardening where you would fill up your garden in the spring and spend all summer out in the heat pulling weeds I mean it was like a daily chore to pull weeds out of every row of your garden every single day and it didn't seem like those people were very happy about having to do that either and then that third option was to just do all raised beds get rid of your in-ground Gardens altogether and only do raised beds because you could control things easier in a raised bed we knew that there had to be an alternate way and so we began looking online to see what we could do differently but that would really work well for us and that led us to where we are today three years ago we discovered the system that we're going to show you guys today we've been using it in our Gardens ever since we've barely had to pull a single weed since that time we can come out in the middle of summer our plants look gorgeous and there's not a single weed to pick that's what we want to show you today and we want to give you some of the hints and tips and things we've learned along the way so that you can Devin exactly like ours so before we head into the garden we want to show you what we're talking about it goes by a lot of different names but what we're talking about is this material right here this is called woven ground cover some people call it weed fabric we call it all kinds of things right what we're talking right it's woven ground cover and what this is is this is a plastic that is approved for organic gardening so it's not gonna leach any thing into your soil no microplastics anything like that and this is a woven fabric I don't know if you can see on the on the video but you can kind of see through it it's almost like a super shade cloth right and the woven properties of it are what make it so effective it's it's much different than if you were to just put a solid piece of like black plastic over your garden there are several things that this does that work really well that solid black plastic would just not do well in your garden so let's talk about those briefly the first thing that is really awesome about this woven ground cover brush I've seen we talked about it in a lot of different ways is that it allows the rain allows water to penetrate through it so you don't have to worry like with the solid black plastic nothing's getting through there right but with this the rain definitely gets through there the other nice thing about this is it actually keeps the ground cooler underneath it then it would be if you just either had bare soil and definitely cooler than if you had a solid black plastic down now solid black plastic is great if you want to kill out a big area if you want to like kill out the grass in an area cover it with solid black plastic for a few weeks and that grass will be dead pretty much forever because it heats up it doesn't let any sunlight through but this stuff this doesn't do that this allows the moisture through and it keeps your soil cool just like a mulch would do when you pull back the mulch you can feel the soil is nice and cool underneath this does the same things in fact last year we did a couple experiments where we came out with a thermometer we tested the soil outside of the garden and then we tested the soil underneath this in every single time it was cooler underneath the ground cover and much like a standard mulch that you would use in your garden this helps retain the moisture that actually gets through and gets into the ground there's a lot less evaporation if you have mulch and this basically acts like mulch so let's head into the garden and we'll show you some of the ways that we use it and then also show you some of the mistakes that we made when we first started using it and the things that we've done to get better over time here we are in the garden this is actually the part of the garden where we grew watermelons last year and man did we have an epic watermelon year last year it was amazing we picked so many watermelons a huge like I think the biggest one was 29 pounds but anyway that's not what we're here to talk about even though that makes me really excited for summer again this year today we want to talk to you about how we use this to grow the watermelons and then different plants in general you can see all of the old vines are actually still here I know a lot of people will pull their old plants out in the fall but the truth is by the time we get to fall around here we are just too dang tired it doesn't really matter we leave them till spring we get out in the spring and we pull them all out then and it's no big deal right so you can see this large expanse of this woven weed fabric and we actually use strips or rows of the weed fabric that are three feet wide and then we connect them you know we we lay them up yeah we lay them on the ground we overlapped up by about six inches and then there are these big landscape stakes better I don't know eight inches long so they look like this maybe six inches long right pound those down into the ground and that's what secures this to the ground and so we just lay them row by row until you get all the way down to the end of your garden and then you have this wonderful expanse of a weed free garden area right the rolls I you can get them in you know much greater widths I think up to twelve feet is that right and so we just get three feet because it's what makes sense for us but it comes in all kinds of widths but generally it comes in lengths of three hundred feet right now when you get it it's a solid piece it doesn't have any holes in it for planting through or anything like that you put those in yourself so that you can get your plant spacing where you want them now the best thing to do for that is to use either a weed torch or just a regular torch and burn a hole where you want to put your plants by burning it it seals off the plastic so it doesn't unravel or fray or fray you could use just a knife but then you're gonna have some issues with it frayed and not lasting as long which gets me to my next point about one of things we really love about this is this stuff will last year after year after year it's actually rated I think for somewhere in the 8 to 12 year range depending on what type you get but you know this stuff is going to be an investment that you're going to be able to use over and over and over again you know for at least at least I'd say five years minimum so yeah once you want you buy it you have it for a long time one thing that we get asked a lot also is how hot this gets and you know the Sun is really intense right now I'm actually too warm right but does the does the black plastic or the the woman weed fabric doesn't get too hot and I'll tell you that every summer I am out here barefoot on this plastic and it's never been too hot for me to be barefoot in the garden right so here we are by one of our watermelon plants from last year you can see that here's the hole that we had made in the ground cover and here's the plant like it's still there but you can see by this point it's pretty easy to just get out of there the roots of all already you know mulched underground which is great and all the vine is here let me show you how easy it is to now get this area ready for planting again this year [Applause] and we'll just get those old vines out of there and now we were able to just dig a hole put new seed in there and plant right in the same holes that we did last year now if you're one of those people who really likes everything to look neat and tidy all the time you can bring your leaf blower out here you can blow all this stuff off you could bring a push broom it just makes things so easy now typically for us we do till our garden before we put this down but we've made the decision that we're only going to tell every other year that way we can also rotate where our plants are so every other year will rotate and will tail which means we do need to pull up all of the plastic and then put it back down in another configuration but because we only have to do it every other year it's a lot less work than preparing an entire big garden bed every single year that's filled with weeds now I want to share with you one lesson that we've learned when putting this down for the very first time we recommend that you till your garden space add your amendments and fertilizers compost whatever it is we recommend that you till the area before putting down the woven weed fabric but then let me tell you something that we didn't do right the first couple times what we tried to do was till the garden and then the very same day or the next day put all of the fabric down the soil was so light and fluffy that when we walked in the soil it made big indentations and it made it really difficult to lay down the woven weed fabric also because the soil was so light and fluffy when we put the staples down in the ground it didn't have enough to really grab on to and so if we had any wind it did have a tendency to pull up a little bit so this is what we're doing now that is different we are still tilling before we put down all of the woven weed fabric but we're waiting for that soil to settle and the best way that we have found for that to happen is to wait for a decent rain to settle everything down let it dry out a bit and then put the weed fabric down it just worked so much better we weren't sinking into the nice fluffy soil and then the staples had something to grab into so that's one of our biggest tips right now is to till wait for rain wait for it to dry and then put down your woven weed fabric there is another pretty big mistake that we were making at the beginning and I want to show you about that and then share with you how we are fixing that so let's go over to the other garden so we can show you so here we are in our other garden now this garden is the garden that we first used the woven ground cover on and we've learned a few things by making some mistakes so let me show you one thing that we did quite a few times to start with and it was still super frustrating when we had things that need to be needed to be planted close together like lettuce and our green beans peas things like that we thought well what we'll do is we'll just leave a space between two pieces of pieces of the woven ground cover like this and then we'll just plant in that space and it can't possibly be that many weeds would grow up in that little space I'm sure our garden plants will just keep the weeds out well you can see in areas like this and now remember this is spring I mean things have just barely started to grow and look how many weeds are already growing in this area this is actually where we planted lettuce last year and within just a couple months of planting the lettuce we could barely find the lettuce because all of these weeds were so mixed in and just as big as the lettuce and it was almost impossible to then come through and even pull the weeds because they were so intertwined with the lettuce let me go over and this isn't even that bad let's go over to where we planted peas last year it will show you what that area looks like now so these are the two rows of our garden where we grew peas last year you can see we still have a you know some trellis up here where the peas room but you can see all of these weeds in this case most of this is Johnson grass and then there's also a ton of other weeds that are growing now keep in mind all of this grew through about a 1 inch strip that we left that we thought would be perfect for the peas so you can see that this just so heavy and thick in between those spaces that it made it impossible to weed in fact when we did start to pull some of this stuff out it was actually so packed in there that when we pulled weeds it actually pulled up the plants that we were trying to grow as well and that just made for a disastrous situation we actually had to decide to just stop weeding and kind of just do the best that we could define the peas so we could harvest so this system just did not work well for us leaving a space between the two pieces of plastic now I do know like our friends Danny and Wanda at Deep South homestead they do it this way and for them it does seem to work I don't think they're weeds or maybe quite as vigorous as ours maybe it's the difference between being further in the south where the weather is warmer and a little drier but here this way just does not work so let's head back over to the other garden where we planted smarter last year and we'll show you what we did over there so these two rows we planted green beans last year and I'll show you what our solution was we burned a hole every 4 to 6 inches and we put our seed there this worked so wonderfully in the short amount of time that a weed could grow in there it was only in this tiny little section so we could just pull him out real quick and then within a few weeks the plants were big enough that it shaded it out and we didn't have to worry about weeds at all again these look fantastic they grew so well we barely had a single weed to pull it all not six foot weeds like over in the other garden this was like a dream and so now that it's time to get ready to plant we can just take our rake rake all of these dead plants out and we are ready to plant again well look at what a good job that did and how easy that was now there are a couple things we need to go through and pull by hands but overall this is so easy and fast and basically weed free another question that we get a lot or more of a comment really is that just seems like so much work to have to put that ground cover down and burn all those holes in the plastic it just seems like a lot of work well the way I look at it is this we can do this in the early spring even over winter if we want to when the weather is nice and cool we can get this all done before the weather starts to get really hot and then during the hot part of the summer we don't have to be out here every day pulling weeds sweating and possibly just wanting to give up because we don't want to do that much work in the heat so you know a little more work upfront yes I I think it probably is a little more work up front but it saves you so much work all summer long so you can just be out here harvesting preserving your harvest and enjoying being in the garden well man it is hot we had to move into the shade another thing we wanted to talk about was ticks and the garden when we first moved here and we were putting a lot of mulch in the garden and doing that back to Eden gardening method for us it just attracted a lot more ticks so we would be planting or harvesting and as we were stooping or kneeling down on the ground we would just get covered with ticks right in this part of the country we just have an insane amount of ticks yes so the the woven ground cover has completely eliminated that problem for us which is why Sarah can be out there barefoot now in the summer exactly so that was a huge win for us the other thing we wanted to talk to you bow is fertilizing we get a lot of questions about how do we fertilize when most of the garden is covered with the woven ground cover for us personally we don't we don't fertilize the entire garden we fertilize each plant we do that mainly right one we're planting our plants if we're planting something from a transplant we'll put some fertilizer down in the bottom of the hole now we mainly just use rabbit manure as fertilizer on our homestead we don't buy any fertilizer we mainly use rabbit manure because we have rabbits and rabbits are really good at making manure so we put a little bit of manure down in the bottom of the hole plant our plant on top and that's all the fertilizing that we do for the entire summer now when it comes to planting seeds in the garden with this woven weed fabric we will plant the seed and then top dress on top of there with rabbit manure or the fertilizer of your choice right and then as the plant grows the fertilizer just you know gets down in the soil right there where the plant is right now this coming year we are going to experiment also with being able to fertilize through our drip irrigation system which is the next thing I want to talk to you about so for a watering system what we use is drip tape irrigation if you're not familiar with drip tape it's basically basically just a drip irrigation system that's designed for larger areas it uses very low water pressure and is very very efficient you can see here this is a piece of the actual drip tape and it's got a little emitter every 12 inches all the way down the row so every 12 inches water can just drip out onto the ground we have these down every row of plants now there's several ways that you can use this drip tape along with the woven ground cover some people choose to put the drip tape underneath the woven ground cover and some people do like us and choose to put it on top there's really no wrong or right way to do it but the reason that we choose to put it on top is we feel like this way if there's a problem with the drip system we will see it sooner if it's underneath we just feel like if there's a problem you're not going to really know it until you start to see some of your plants die so by having on top it's just a little easy here to keep an eye on it and make sure that there's no problems that's why we choose to do it that way you probably would get a little bit better watering if it were underneath but here in the Ozarks we get a lot of rain also so it's not really that big of a concern for us if you live in a very very dry area maybe underneath would work better for you so there you go guys that is the secret to our easy wonderful enjoyable garden I hope you consider it for yourselves now a great place for you to check out this woven weave fabric and the drip system is through grower solution.com they're fantastic people now because of the whole Kovan 19 virus outbreak I do think they are limiting some of the things that they're shipping right now so keep that in mind I think you can place an order with them but it might take you a little longer to get it than normal but they are a great place to buy all kinds of gardening supplies we highly recommend them we're excited for you guys to follow along another season as we garden along with the woven ground cover if you've been following us for a while you have seen it work the last two summers and it is amazing but we hope the word will get out there so more and more people can start using it believe it or not there was a time that we were almost ready to give up on gardening completely because we just couldn't keep up with the weeds this stuff has completely changed her mind about gardening and has made it so enjoyable once again and we believe so strongly and everybody growing their own food that if there is an easier way to do it you absolutely should be doing it so you guys if you're enjoying our videos make sure to hit the subscribe button below also the best way you can help us here on the homestead is to share our videos until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 2,390,223

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, growingpotatoes, how to grow potatoes, homestead family, how to grow your own food, how to grow a garden, gardening, weed fabric, woven weed fabric, plastic ground cover

Id: M1jwgVa1l3Y

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020