THIS SIMPLE TRICK WILL MAKE YOUR GARDEN PRACTICALLY WEED-FREE!

today I want to talk about weeds we get a lot of people asking how do we manage weeds in our garden how do we keep them looking clean and relatively weed free well there's a lot of things a lot of strategies and techniques we use to keep weeds down in our garden we plant cover crops when we do plant vegetables we plant them really densely so we shade out majority of the garden we use drip irrigation so we're only watering right there where the plants need it and also we use frequent shallow cultivation so that weeds rarely go to seed and that keeps our weed seed bank low that's probably a whole other video as far as really getting into those topics so today I want to focus specifically on this subject right here how do we keep this grass nice and neat along this edge here of the garden how do we keep this grass from creeping in the garden how do we maintain this edge here so our garden stays nice and clean but we have our grass over here and our walkways now if you're a frequent viewer of the channel you probably already know this but this area behind me is what we call the dream garden this is our second year growing in this spot we've got six plots out here each plot is 30 by 35 feet and between each plot we have 10 foot pathways so we can walk between there carry our tools between there drive our buggy between there when we're harvesting and working in each different plot now the walkways in my dream garden here are grass a lot of people have asked why don't you use wood chips or straw or something else besides grass because seems like grass would be troublesome because it's always trying to creep into the garden well we've actually experimented with wood chips and mulch before when we use to do our demonstration garden out at the sunbelt expo we had wood chips there and the reason I don't like wood chips is because you get a hard rain you get some wind they're always blowing into the plot there and you're always having to come in kind of clean it up rake them back into the pathways to keep it nice and tidy also you would constantly you know at least a couple times a year have to add more wood chips you know for them to serve their purpose and keep you know anything from growing in those pathways with grass I can simply mow it and as I'm going to show you today it's pretty easy to keep that grass where you want it and not creeping into your plots now I didn't seed these walkways with grass there was grass here before we harrowed all this up there was grass between the pine trees that were all out here those rows of pine trees with grass between them that we mowed and we cut down those pine trees when we were making this or these plots here and harrowed it up but once we kind of established where our plots were going to be over time the grass kind of grew back and it looks nice right now now most of this is what we call centipede grass which is very prevalent down here in the south but we also have some of this bermuda grass which a lot of people struggle with as far as creeping in their garden so we can see some of that bermuda grass right here very very prevalent down here in the south that stuff can form runners like that right there and take off in no time but I'm going to show you today how we take care of that so depending on what kind of grass you got this may be a little more of a battle you know the centipede doesn't seem to creep into the garden as bad it kind of maintains its edge pretty well like you see here if you get some of that bermuda grass you might have to be a little bit more proactive uh as far as what we're gonna do today so we've had some afternoon showers the last couple days and I need to get in here and lightly cultivate this area and that edge there where I got these zinnias planted still got those canary melons kicking right there but we've got these zinnias here we need to weed in between these rows and weed that edge right there you see we got some nut grass popping up in here and uh that rain has kind of compacted this soil so we need to come in here and just do a light cultivation fluff it up a little bit keep any of those tiny weeds that we can't even see yet from uh growing any further so let's head on over to the barn and see what our weapons of choice are gonna be today so we got a few of our wheel hoes right here and if you're not familiar with the concept of the wheel hoe think of it like a little mini tractor so it's got this tool bar on it right here and you can attach a wide range of attachments to this toolbar to kind of do whatever you want to do lightly cultivate cut weeds make a furrow make a heel even lay drip tape all kind of good stuff so this is our double wheel hoe on our single wheel hoe here I've got one of our 12 inch oscillating hoe attachments attached to it and so this thing has a really nice strong blade but it's thin so it slices through the soil really easily sharp on both sides you get that kind of oscillating action right there so you can cut forwards and backwards that's why we call it the oscillating hoe and it's sharp on around the corners here so that provides some kind of edging action alongside the garden now if you got a smaller garden you know you may want to go with more of a handheld option and we have that as well with our stirrup hoe here which is a six inch blade on it it also rocks back and forth as you see there and like I said if you got a smaller plot that right there does a wonderful job you can get some pretty big nasty thick weeds with that guy right there today what we're going to be using is this double wheel hoe here and we're going to put some of our newly redesigned sweeps on here and show you how those guys work so these here are our sweeps and several different ways you can set these up and I'll show you you've got a left and a right here and the angles on the blades are slightly different so that they'll overlap just like that right there now we recently redesigned these things and made them thicker and stronger so they used to be made with 1 8th inch metal here now they're made with 3 16th so 50% thicker nice and strong there these guys have a really good sharp blade on them here which will be exposed once we put these in the soil a little bit it's also sharp around the corner there so it gives you some of that nice edging action like I showed you on that oscillating so several different ways we can set these up and get them right here so the way we're going to be doing it today is going to be like this right here so you see those blades overlapping in the middle there you get a better grip on them and you can move these things inward if you want a little more aggressive weeding in the center there you can move them out there to make a wider weeding path some people will even use our extension bar or spreader bar put them way out here put a cultivator tooth in the middle there to give them a nice weeding path so lots of different things you can do some people also use this technique where you leave a gap in the middle of them and you can straddle a row of plants and cultivate closely on both sides but today we're going to be doing this setup right here giving us about a 12 inch weeding path so let's get these hooked up and see what they do all right all right all right we got those sweeps set up on there and you can see how that blade attacks the soil at an angle there and that's gonna you just make a real shallow cut to the soil not going to disturb a lot of your soil structure but that attack angle there is going to help cut them weeds and kind of flip them over so they'll dry out in the sun but before we turn the wheel hoe loose in here I need to make one more pass with my single time cultivator between these double rows of zinnias they've almost grown up to the extent that the foliage is going to cover this gap here and shade it out but I probably need to make one more pass I'm going to take my single time cultivator here a little nice simple tool I've got drip tape buried beneath these rows you can see that row end right there so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take my single tine and come through here and just kind of barely scratch between this double row to make sure you know no weeds are coming up through there until this foliage kind of covers this area with a nice canopy there now when you do this you want to make sure your drip tape is off we're using the the blunt side of this single time cultivator here but just in case you were to kind of come into contact with that tape with that sharp point there when the tape is off much less risk of nicking that tape as opposed to when the tape is on so we always want to do this when our drip tape or our irrigation is off and we'll just run through here real quick like and kind of scuffle this up between this double row all right all right all right it's time for a little wheel hoe action we're going to start over here kind of where these canary melons are if we clip a little bit of them vines won't be a big deal at all kind of clean minutes to do half of this thousand square foot plot get it nice and cleaned up there keep that edge nice and straight and clean there now with the majority of your weeds almost all your weeds just aggravating them just kind of flipping them over like this is going to take care of them even with this pesky nut grass here you do this you know come in here at least once a week maybe even twice a week if your pressure's high and do this and uh you'll eventually see that nut grass go away you just kind of kind of aggravate it to death now the only weed I would say that you might want to rake out or remove is this pesky stuff right here this purslane now I know some of you gonna say oh you should be eating that you can eat that that's good stuff well I ain't got quite that hungry yet so we'll just throw that out of here and if you got real bad weed pressure you might want to rake some of those weeds out most of this stuff here it's gonna bake in the sun and die pretty quick just like that grass right there some of that right there or that nut grass I showed you earlier now I know some of you are gonna say what are you talking about weeding there wasn't no weeds in there to start with well that's exactly the point we do this frequent shallow cultivation at least once a week in here before the weeds get bad and that's how we keep our weed pressure down it's not really a big secret it's not really complicated just got to get out here take a few minutes zip through there and you can keep everything nice and clean and in my humble opinion doing that right there for a few minutes once or twice a week it's a lot easier than doing some kind of mulching technique where you've got to add mulch and if you do get weeds you got to pull them by hand whereas that right there takes five minutes maybe 10 minutes if you consider putting on the sweeps themselves it doesn't take long at all just got to be diligent about it and don't wait till you see a bunch of weeds to lightly cultivate get on a regular schedule get on a regular program stay on top of it and you'll have some nice looking gardens as a result I'll put some links in the description below so you can head on over to our website and get you one of these tools to routinely cultivate and keep those weeds at bay in your garden if you enjoyed this video make sure to give me a big thumbs up don't forget to hit that subscribe button and hit that bell notification button so you get notified every time we come out with a new video and if you did enjoy this video check out these other two videos right here I've done in the past on weeding and cultivating the garden I

Channel: HOSS

Views: 137,741

Keywords: weeding, garden weeds, weeding the garden, how to remove weeds, weed removal tool, weeding tool, garden hoe, best garden hoe, best tool for weeding, tool for removing weeds, nutgrass, nutsedge, how to remove nutgrass, garden cultivator, wheel hoe, hoss wheel hoe, garden weeder, push plow, push cultivator, push weeder, stirrup hoe, hula hoe, cobrahead

Id: baRHxxNKKCw

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020