What’s so wrong with weeds, anyway? Aside from the fact that they end up making
the garden look shaggier and more unkempt than a final-round contestant on
Survivor, that is. Mainly, we execute
them for crimes against healthy plant nutrition - for stealing the nutrients
our cultivated crops need.
To keep weeds from growing in the first place, we planted a
lot of our widely-spaced plants like tomatoes and cabbage on plastic. We rolled out four-foot wide IRT plastic
rolls of plastic, then cut holes ever foot or two to plant the baby
plants. In addition to keeping weeds
from growing (lack of sunlight will do that to you), the plastic has the added
benefit of keeping the soil more moist.
Of course, now the south end of our garden looks a bit like a giant Hefty
bag, but hey – you can’t argue with success.
For the close-together plants that we grow in rows from seed
(like beets, carrots, and the various greens and lettuces we’ve been harvesting
over the past few weeks), plastic isn’t really an option. Our drip-tape irrigation
system certainly helps – because we’re only watering a couple of inches on either
side of the row, weeds further out than that tend to lack the water to
thrive.
But despite all the preventative measures, somehow the weed
party always gets started eventually.
And there’s just no substitute for good old fashioned weed pulling. We try to do a little every couple of days to
stay ahead of it, but life is life after all, and sometimes it just gets away
from us. So we have days like today,
when we spent a couple hours bending over row after row of small plants,
pulling weeds with both hands until we filled the wheelbarrow! Tomorrow we’ll bring out the grand-daddy of
all weed whackers, the rototiller, to take care of the weeds in between the
rows. Tonight’s much-needed soaking rain means it
will be easier to disturb the roots of the weeds and bring them to the surface
where they can dry out and die. Weeds,
you’ve met your match. Until next week,
anyway.
