The Super Easy Organic Way to Kill Weeds & Build Soil

welcome back I'm David the good and today we are going to terminate this cover crop and I'm going to show you a method that works for ending a cover crop or ending a lawn or ending weeds and it's really [Music] simple at the beginning of summer we planted this sun hemp out here Sun hemp is a nitrogen fixing legume meaning that it's in the bean and pee family it's actually crotal areia this cotal area this sun hemp here it's done okay it's been really really hot we had multiple months of miserable hot weather and it's been very very droughty getting about 1 in of rain per month it's been terrible for this time of year normally when we would put in Sun hemp at the beginning of Summer after we harvested out our cool season crops the sun hemp would get very tall and thick this is thin and it did not make near the biomass as when we did it before it's kind of ridiculously bad but you can see it still did some good work it's still made some biomass it's In Bloom now which means it's setting seeds and it's going to start to lose more of its nitrogen as it does that so we want to just incorporate this down into the ground so we can use this area for something else later on we're not going to use this area for quite a while I'm just going to let this area sit until spring but I want to put all of this biomass compost into the ground and have all the roots beneath rot down and have it be really really beautiful by the time we plant in the spring and so this is how I'm going to do it and I'm going to show you the way that is this way that I'm going to do it right [Music] now [Music] [Applause] [Music] any bare areas that I have or more bare areas I've try to throw down this thin cover crop over kind of just give it a little more organic material I have a patchy thin spot and just kind of somewhat evenly distribute it my old one reduce reuse recycle now we've covered the entire area with this woven Nursery fabric it's called thewit Sun Belt woven Nursery fabric I originally was recommended this by a friend of mine who ran a nursery and he said it lasts for a decade you know you can just throw it down in the ground put your pots over the top of it it's fantastic stuff it lets the water through so it drains and it just stays for a long long time so uh I have used this now for years and we've used it for our nurseries and we've used it for weed block and it works exceptionally well I will put a link to it below and I'll use my Amazon link which is for some reason the cheapest way to buy it and if you buy it then I get a small percentage of it so if you want to support the channel do that otherwise look it up yourself and don't use my link and then you can make sure you give me absolutely no money but I love it and I've used it for years it's one of the few concessions to modernity that I use in my garden you know plastic I don't like plastic in general but this stuff is very useful so this area now is going to rot down underneath this the water can still flow through it we just throw whatever we have to uh cover it and you know keep it from blowing around you don't want it to blow around you'll have to put more blocks on it or use those Staples to hammer into the ground ground Staples um that's what we used until we ran out of them and then we just threw scrap wood and bricks and stuff over the rest of it but covering the ground here this is going to rot down underneath and it leaves a really nice compost Rich area that is just you know all the seeds and everything underneath just rot down and then you have a blank area to work with in the spring if you put it down in the summer it really rapidly kills an area underneath like you can use it to knock your lawn out if you want to um if you're going to put it in a garden later if you do it over the winter it takes longer obviously because things are not actively growing a lot of stuff has gone dormant so you're going to have to leave it through the growing season for a period of time and just let the sun bake it down so then you have your nice open area and all the weeds have been toasted some weeds with ryom take a lot longer some of them are pretty quick like regular lawn grass usually only takes a few months in the summer to kill off this going all the way through the winter through the rest of the heat that we have in the fall and then into the early spring it ought to be pretty dead so we should take a look at uh an area that I put some down on let's see about four or 5 months ago we'll go take a look at that and you can see what it looks like when you pull it up so you can see this right here was all grass all all that organic matter rotted down into compost this is just a few months and now we just have a a stale seed bed here that we could plant right into if we wanted to we could just make some beds here or just plant right directly into the ground but it does an excellent job it excludes the light but it lets the water through and everything underneath we just keep that organic matter you can also use tarps you could use black plastic like you get from Home Depot or you could use those big silage tarps I've never been able to find silage tarps in our area or else I might use those but these uh strips of fabric are really easy to use so that's what we use it's what we could get and we've reused them repeatedly on different projects and we just fold them up and put them aside or roll them up and stick them somewhere else you know out of the sun when we're not using them so they kind of get thrown into the Garden or into a nursery area and then repurposed later on a regular basis if you want to learn more about weed control this book right here winning the war on Weeds by John moody this is a no till gardening handbook and he's got a ton of good ideas on weed control how to stop weeds from getting into your garden to begin with how to control various varieties how to crush them down around fence lines how to do all kinds of stuff just basically it's like one method after another method after another method that they have used on their Farm learned from various people experimented with themselves and developed over the years of taking care of a family farm and I highly recommend it uh winning the war on Weeds by John Moody I will put a link to this below as well catch you all next time thanks for watching um be sure to check out all the links and stuff and like And subscribe and all those kind of things we're almost at 300,000 subscribers so thank you all for that catch you next time and until then may your thumbs always be green it's not good the my side handles have like dried up in storage I really could use a proper tightening so it doesn't look like I'm fighting with my side the entire time go ahead welcome back welcome back I'm David the good and today I'm going to show you how to do a quick weed elimination and composting thing and cover crop termination and that sounds weird let's see welcome back I went to see David David the good we listen to pis head and drink spiced rum

Channel: David The Good

Views: 180,743

Keywords: gardening, composting, David The Good, organic gardening, roundup alternative, organic weed killer, natural weed killer, weed killer, weed control, kill weeds, get rid of weeds, natural weed control, kill weeds naturally, homemade weed killer, control weeds, diy weed killer, sunn hemp, cover crop, terminate a cover crop

Id: 4VCg5dt3hc8

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023