How to Outsmart Your Weeds

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Our Favorite Weeding Tips

by Sandy Swegel

It’s Spring.  Your plants are tiny and growing. Your weeds are huge and growing.  If you want a nice garden, you really do have to outsmart your weeds and deal with the weeds that are gobbling up your soil nutrients and drinking your water.  Weeding doesn’t have to be a horrible task if you address the problem areas early and try to learn to understand how weeds behave so you can be smarter than they are.

Prioritize.

Here’s the order I go in…tackling the worst weeds first and then moving on.

  1. Noxious Weeds – for your state’s noxious weed list, go to  http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxiousDriver. These are the weeds known to be a problem in your area.  You must ban them from your garden.
  2. Weeds you know to be a problem for your garden bed. These are the weeds that come up every year and make the same problems every year.  Time to stop that cycle.
  3. Weeds that are in the areas that really matter to you—the flower beds in your front yard, your vegetable garden.  There are no doubt weeds everywhere but start with the ones that spoil your gardening.

Know your Weed and Have a Strategy for Each Kind of Weed.

Weeding isn’t just an aerobic activity to do in a frenzy of spring energy. Different weeds require different methods of dealing with them.  I see four different kinds of weeds in my garden:

Weedy Grasses

Weedy grasses are easier to get very early in the year.  In late winter, the weedy grasses often green up first, making them visible a block away.  Dig these up thoroughly getting all the runners when possible.

Annual Weeds

These are the weeds that grow from seed every year.  Killing them is usually very easy when they are young because they have a very small root system and you can sometimes just pull them by hand, or run a hoe across them to slice off all their heads.  Small annual weeds also die when burned with a propane torch or soaked with boiling water. Approach when they are small and win!

Perennial Weeds

Yikes, these are the deep-rooted weeds that have grown in the same spot for years.  My strategy for dealing with them is to be more aggressive each time I see them.  I try to dig out the weed completely.  If it returns, I dig an extra four inches down to make sure I get it. If it returns again, I dig even deeper until I get the bottom of that weed or I exhaust its ability to regrow. Burning or boiling water only work if you repeat it for three or more days in a row.

Pernicious Weeds  

OK, so there are bindweed and weeds with subterranean runners. More than just perennial, these weeds seldom die by pulling alone. But you can control them by aggressively blocking out their light and reducing their water.  A sheet of cardboard or multiple layers of newspapers laid directly on the weed and soil and covered by mulch blocks out water and light…two crucial items for growth. Keep the area well mulched and you will eventually win. But you must be thorough and consistent.

You’ll notice I don’t have chemical controls on this list. I certainly try to limit the toxic chemicals I introduce into the environment, especially with things that might kill bees. But the real reason I don’t use chemicals is that the chemicals legally available aren’t always that effective.  Take Roundup, for example.  It works because you spray the Roundup on the foliage and the plant takes the chemical down into the roots.  But in the Spring, plants aren’t taking energy down to their roots, they’re sending it up making new leaves.  Roundup just doesn’t work that well in the Spring. And the time you spend standing over the weed dousing it in chemicals could have just as well been spent digging.

3 Superfast Ways to Weed this Spring!

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How to Quickly Handle Weeds

1. Off with their heads.  Most of us spend our time nurturing seedlings….but weed seedlings are a very different species.  With the first warm spells of spring, hundreds of thousands of weed seeds germinate.  I sharpen my hand-held hoe (a scuffle hoe works too…any sharp edge) and one swift run along the ground kills hundreds of baby weed seeds.

2. Invite them to Tea.  I take my fancy cordless electric tea kettle that heats water very quickly and automatically shuts off.  I slowly pour boiling water over very young weeds (not more than first true leaves) and they die instantly. This is especially good in patio and sidewalk cracks.  Boiling water kills big weeds too but takes much more boiling water.

3. Weed-whack em.  My trusty weed whacker doesn’t kill weeds for good, but it is very effective at making them disappear.  You do have to wear safety glasses for this use.  I take the weed-whacker to the garden of giant weeds and whack the weeds directly to the ground.  A little soil and debris can fly up, hence the need for safety glasses.  After raking up all the weed debris, the job of weeding doesn’t seem so impossible even though I know weeds lurk below the surface.

Extra hint:  Are you left-handed?  Some of the best garden tools in the world are Japanese and sold by Hida Tool in Berkeley or online.  They have left-handed versions of many tools. http://www.hidatool.com/shop/shop.html

Want to really learn about weeds?  “The Manual of Weeds” from 1914 is online at Chest of Books http://chestofbooks.com/flora-plants/weeds/Manual-Of-Weeds/index.html proving how long gardeners have been fighting weeds!

Front Yard Vegetable Gardens

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Heirloom Vegetable Seeds

I’m fortunate to know lots of gardeners.  They are a quiet bunch for the most part and sometimes rather eccentric.  But they are on the forefront of an environmental movement that is making a big difference in our community: turning front yards into vegetable gardens!  It begins as the gardener runs out of room in the backyard to make more garden beds, and starts looking wistfully out the front window at the expanse of green lawn. Going from backyard to front yard is like going to a different country.  The vegetables out back are grown organically with manures and compost. There are honey bees and birds and butterflies attracted to the flowers growing among the vegetables.  The front lawn is a pristine deep green thanks to synthetic fertilizers and weed killers but lacks the vitality and delight of the backyard.

For most people turning the front yard into a vegetable garden takes some negotiating with a significant other who likes the lawn, but the idea of not having to mow week after week often tilts the balance.

So what happens when you turn your front yard into a vegetable garden? In the beginning, neighbors eye you suspiciously, worried you’re going to lower property values.  By mid-June, as you’re starting to get some good produce and butterflies are flitting about, people are a bit curious and start to walk by on your side of the street.  A neighbor kid on a bike asks “Whatcha doin’?” when you’re out shoveling compost onto the new beds.  By mid-summer, tomatoes are coming in strong, and the guy next door is hanging out watching you build a vertical wood structure to handle the squash that wants to grow out into the street.  Finally, come Fall and pumpkin season (hey look, Halloween decorations are already growing right in the yard) you realize you know the names of some of your neighbors. And you’re going to have to plant a bigger garden next year to plan for sharing the bounty with your new friends.

It is a lot of work converting a front yard into a vegetable garden.  There can be serious digging involved. You have to change your practices from lawn management to building safe and healthy soil. You have to keep things tidy and attractive. The rewards of front yard vegetable gardens are many. More food, more space to garden, more people who understand the relationship between food and the environment, and best of all, sharing late summer produce with friends and kindred spirits right in your own front yard!

3 Veggies You Gotta Grow at Home!

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Heirloom Vegetable Seeds

These three veggies you gotta grow at home because they aren’t easy to find in grocery stores. Even if you can buy them, they are so much better fresh out of the garden AND super easy to grow at home.

Broccoli Raab Rapini This is a relative to big broccoli stalks. You get the same great taste and vitamins as the bigger broccoli except this is easier and faster to cook. You can buy raab in the grocery stores sometimes, but it’s often large and the leaves can be tougher. Clipped young out of the garden and sauteed with olive oil or in stir-fry, it’s tender and sweet.  And it’s easy to throw a little in your juicer without it overwhelming other vegetables.

Chioggia Beets You can buy beets with greens attached, but again you don’t get the young tender sweet greens you can clip directly out of the garden that are great for stir-fry or slipped into a mixed salad.  Any beet would work, but the Chioggia have those super cool stripes that look great sliced very thin in a salad.

Dwarf Grey Sugar Peas Anyone who has read this blog knows I’ve got a thing for peas. But the dwarf grey sugars reign above all the others.  First, the plant with its pretty pink flowers could pass for a sweet pea.  Second, even the leaves of this pea are tasty and you could grow these peas just for microgreens. Third, the young pod is sublime. Eaten young right off the plant it is sweet and tender. Grown a little more, it’s a great snack refrigerated or even to be used in the traditional way in a stir-fry.

Gardening is fun but also can take a lot of time and work. I like to grow food that I can’t just buy in the grocery store but is a delight when grown at home.

Very Basic Seed Starting

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Try These Seed Starting Tips

I teach basic seed starting for beginners classes every year and while there are often some people who are true beginners and have never started seeds before, more people who seek out a class are gardeners who have tried starting seeds and had some failures. So I like to keep seed starting very simple.  All I want you to do is think like a seed.

All I want you to remember is:

Seeds WANT to live. The very meaning of life for a seed is to germinate and make a plant. Most of the time, we just have to get out of the way.

Seeds need 5 Things:

Water Seeds need to be well hydrated to germinate.  Think about how we soak our peas to speed germination.  But they don’t want to be sitting in water.  You need to check the soil each day and make sure the top of the soil isn’t drying up and hardening.  Sometime even misting is enough.

Temperature Each seed needs the soil (not just the air) to reach a certain temperature before it starts to grow.  I learned early that just because I liked to plant peas on St. Patrick’s Day, that didn’t mean that worked in Colorado. Our soil warms up later than other places and the peas weren’t coming up until it was warmer.  Each seed has a temperature it prefers and it just sits in the soil until it gets that.

Light A few seeds like lettuce need light to germinate….so you can’t plant them beneath the soil.  Seeds also need light to keep growing, which is why they get weak and spindly growing inside away from bright light.

Air Notice that soil isn’t in this list.  Seeds don’t care much if the soil is full of amendments or a special seed starting mix. (The plant will have opinions later….but for now we’re just thinking about the seed.) Seeds by design carry their own food. They do need air.  Air in the soil they are growing in for their tender little roots to move in.  Heavy clay soil is tough for a tiny root…there’s no place for it to go.  Seeds also need air above ground. Breezes lightly flowing among young seedlings make the young plants strong and protect them from fungus.

Time Time is the most important issue for beginners.  Most often when beginners think they have failed, it isn’t because the seeds didn’t come up.  It’s because they didn’t come up YET! Don’t give up too quickly. Some seeds germinate immediately, but some need an extra week or two until conditions are just right.

All the information you need is on the back of each seed packet.  Don’t over think seed starting….just offer the seeds a little hospitality with a comfortable environment and they’ll do what seeds want to do.

Seeds WANT to  live.

Info and Photo: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2005-12-01/Seed-Starting-Basics.aspx

Tools of the Trade: Row Cover

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Try This Secret of Success

Every pursuit has tools that make it easier to be successful. Ask any gardener and they’ll pull out their own favorite tool with a wry grin and and a long story about why you have to have this tool

Row Cover is one of my own top secrets of success. I use it in all seasons at all different times of the growing season.  Also known as frost cloth, it is a light-weight white fabric that looks just like interfacing. Row cover’s great attribute is that it creates a protective barrier between the seed, plant or soil against the ravages of sun, wind and cold. It’s also handy for protecting against insects like flea beetles. Here’s how I use it throughout the seasons:

Spring Right now, row cover is in the garden over areas that I’ve seeded that I want to help germinate.  The row cover protects the germinating seeds and seedling from getting too dry because the gardener forgets to water often enough.  It also is a physical barrier that protects against harsh sun, wind or hungry birds.  Temperature under the row cover is a few degrees warmer which is enough to speed up germination.

Any Season When you are transplanting, row cover can be the secret tool that enables your plants to survive transplanting.  I use it when I transplanting out seedlings I’ve grown indoors, or plants from the nursery, or even perennials I’m moving in my own yard.  Keeping leaves from desiccating from sun or wind is the keep to successful transplanting.

Mid Summer Lettuce lovers keep their greens from bolting too soon by covering them with row cover.  In Spring the row cover kept heat in…now, it keeps the hot summer sun out and lowers the temperature around the plants.  Lettuce stays sweeter longer.  Eventually, lettuce still bolts, but about the time that happens, it’s time to reseed the garden for fall greens.  Row covers then keep the seeds moist enough to grow.

Fall So often a frost comes one early fall night that kills lots of your warm season plants.  It’s a shame because there are often another two or three weeks of good growing time for tomatoes or other tender vegetables.  Five degrees of protection under row cover means your tomatoes survive a light frost.

Winter If you have a greenhouse, row cover inside the greenhouse and give you an extra zone’s warmth. I visited an unheated greenhouse in snowy Colorado this week that had lettuce planted last Fall and now being harvested for fresh greens.

When to take row cover off  The one-time row cover isn’t helpful is when your plants need to be pollinated. Bees and moths and butterflies need to be able to fly from flower to flower gather nectar and pollinating the plants.  Lettuces and greens don’t need the pollinators, but strawberries and peas and anything else that flowers and sets fruit does. Once you start to see flowers, you need to pull the row cover aside.

Keeping the row cover on OK, if you’re in a windy area that’s the biggest challenge. Big farming operations dig a trench alongside their beds, put the row cover in and then fill in the trench with soil to hold the row cover down.  Home gardeners can place a few rocks strategically placed or even a heavy piece of lumber.

more info:

http://tinyurl.com/b28755y

http://tinyurl.com/bh983my

Gardening for Beginners

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Try These First Timer Tips

If you are a beginner, you’ll soon learn that Gardening is both an art and science….and a bit of luck. You start by reading books and the backs of seed packets. You ask other gardeners and talk to strangers at the garden center. But mostly you observe. You watch what others are doing. You watch the plants in your garden. You pay attention to the weather and birds and insects and raccoons. And best of all, no matter what you know, or how long you’ve gardened, there is always something new to learn. It doesn’t matter either if you don’t have enough space outside to do gardening. You can easily just get something like these LED grow lights and do some gardening inside, or you could go see if there is a community garden center that you could partake in. There are loads of options.

The Very Basics you Need:

Light. Gardens do better in sun. You can get by with partial shade but if you want tomatoes and beans, you need at least six hours of sun a day. More preferably.

Soil. Roots need soil and air. If you have soil that needs a pickaxe to dig a hole, you need to add “amendments” like compost or composted manure, to lighten the soil. It doesn’t need to be fluffy like potting soil…but it needs to have enough air to receive water and to drain.

Water. With drought at record levels all over the country last year, it’s easy to understand that plants need water. When you’re starting seeds, the soil needs to be moist on the surface till the seeds germinate. Later, the soil needs to be moist an inch down when you put your finger in the soil. In the beginning, when plants are young, you might need to water every day. You have to keep checking. There’s a solution to this problem, if you have a look into the Powerblanket sizing chart and follow up by purchasing the recommended size, this will allow you to have a temperature controlled bucket which will preserve the water supply throughout summer.

Space. Plants need space both above and beneath the ground. Not too much space because they do like growing in groups and communities. But read your seed packet and be sure to give your plants at least a few inches of space.

Time. Gardening is a four-dimensional event. It changes dramatically over time. You need enough time for the plants to grow to full term. Lettuce is ready to eat in a few weeks. Winter squash can take 100 days. As the weather changes, what the plant needs changes, so you have to keep adapting. You also have to keep track of time and can’t let a week or two pass without checking on your garden.

Love. Gardens that children grow will often thrive even though the kids don’t do everything right. That’s the love factor. I look back at my first gardens and can’t believe I managed to get anything to eat. But I loved the process. I loved playing in the dirt and watching seeds germinate. I loved the idea of the garden even when I forgot to go out to water. I loved the red tomatoes in the sun. And the plants forgave my shortcomings and grew in that atmosphere of love.

Watch, Learn and Enjoy.

Or as we like to say at BBBSeed: Grow. Enjoy. Share.

Resources:

‘Organic Gardening’ magazine is a great resource. Years of articles are online. You can start with their basic how to garden. http://tinyurl.com/bhlqfcy

Square-foot Gardening was most helpful to me when I started learning. Gardening seemed like such a big project…but I could do 4 feet x 4 feet without feeling overwhelmed. http://www.squarefootgardening.org/

Gardening is very different in an arid climate like Colorado compared to humid places like Louisiana or Oregon. Check with your local Cooperative Extension (every state has an extension service from its ag university.)

Gardening for newcomers to Colorado is here: http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/garden/07220.html

www.gardeninginfozone.com

What you Should Never do in your Garden!

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Why You Should Always Avoid Wet Soil

A bounty of snowfall followed by a warm sunny day has this gardener itching at the bit to get outside and play in the dirt.  A nice wet Spring usually makes for excellent gardening all year, but this is the one time you can ruin your garden, harming it sometimes for years. Don’t let Spring Fever lead you to destroy your soil and do what you should never do in your garden!!

Never dig in your garden when the soil is wet.  If clumps of clay are sticking to your boots….it’s too wet.

Don’t dig wet soil.

Don’t rototill wet soil.

Don’t walk on wet garden soil.

Just stay away.

The key to happy plants and happy roots is air in the soil. When you dig in wet soil (unless you are growing in sand) you create clods of compressed soil that stick to your shoes like glue and turn into big chunks of virtual concrete when it dries. It could be years until you get good soil texture again. You can’t easily turn the clods back into good soil.  Hitting it with a shovel when dry (the voice of experience speaks loudly here) just turns the soil into dust.

So start some seeds, prune some trees if they are still dormant, sharpen your tools, but the most important thing to do on a wet Spring day is to stay out of the garden soil!

 

 

Succession Planting ~ Part 2

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Two Week Intervals

Last week I talked about Succession Planting by using varieties that have different times to maturity. There are two more easy kinds of Succession Planting you can use to you have a steady source of the best-tasting food and to make the best use of your space.

Plant the same crop at intervals.

The seed packet again gives you the information you need.  It says things like “plant at two-week intervals.” This is a great idea for crops like lettuces and carrots and beets or similar crops that just taste best when young.  If you plant all your carrots at once, you’ll have nice young carrots mid-season but by the end of the season, you’ll be pulling big gnarly carrots out of the ground.  Sometimes these can taste great and sometimes they get too woody.   Likewise, you’re going to want to have fall carrots because they get so sweet when the weather gets cooler.  If you planted all your carrots in May, you’re either going to run out of them, or the stress they went through during the heat of summer will have made them tough.

I help myself remember to plant at intervals by picking specific calendar dates. I pick the 1st and the 15th of each month as days to plant again.

Plant two or more crops in succession.

This technique is especially good for people with limited space or who practice square-foot gardening.  You start a cool season crop such as greens or radishes in an area. When they are ready, you harvest and eat them, and then you plant a summer crop such as corn or beans in that spot.  It’s like having twice the garden space. Sometimes I’ll “interplant” crops such as green onions or carrots and tomatoes.  Tomato plants stay small until the heat of summer kicks in, so I’ll plant green onions and carrots in front of the tomato plants.  By the time the tomatoes start to get really big, I will have already harvested the onions and carrots and the tomatoes have lots of room.  The more things that are planted and growing in an area, the fewer weeds you’ll have to pull.  And that’s always a good thing. So keep an eye out…if you’re pulling up a crop that’s finished, plant something new.

Crops to plant every two weeks:

Beans Carrots Corn Green Onions  Lettuce Spinach

Crops to plant one after the other:

Peas followed by Corn Radish followed by Zucchini Green Onions followed by Peppers Cilantro followed by Beans

Succession Planting ~ Days to Maturity

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Plant All Varieties

One of the challenges in the home vegetable garden is the cycle most gardeners experience of feast or famine…Either nothing’s ready to harvest or you have so much of a single crop all at one time, that lots of good foods end up going to waste.  Succession planting is the common way to manage the garden, staggering plantings over several weeks instead of just one big planting that first nice warm day. An even easier way to stagger your harvests instead of going out every weekend to plant again is to plant different varieties of the vegetable…each of which has a different time to harvest.  On the back of every seed packet, there’s a little bit of vital information “days to maturity.”

Surprisingly, not every variety of vegetable takes the same period of time to be ready to eat. Taking my spring favorite, the green pea, the labels reveal that Alaska Pea is an early pea and is ready to eat in only 55 days.  At the other end of the spectrum, Green Arrow is a late-season pea…It takes 68 days to ripen.  Dwarf Gray, the pretty pink-flowered oriental pea, is ready right in the middle at 59 days.

If you plant all three varieties on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th and allowing some time for germination, by the last week in May, the Alaska will be ready for eating.  In early June, you’ll still be getting some Alaska but the Dwarf Grays will be ripening.  Another week or so and the Green Arrows finally start. You can keep the harvest going even longer by making sure to keep the peas picked…so they keep making new peas. After a good five weeks of peas, you’ll be ready for something new.

You can apply this technique to any vegetable…If you plant several varieties of lettuces on the same day, the loose varieties will be ready first. Then the slower heading varieties will begin plumping out and finally, a sturdy, late-season lettuce like Black-Seeded Simpson that can handle a little heat will round out the season.  An even easier way to plant lettuce is to plant a mix like the Heirloom Blend which includes several different kinds of lettuces with different maturities all in the same packet.  You can extend lettuce even longer by harvesting with a cut and come again method…Bring your scissors and cut off what you need for your salad.  The plant will regrow for next week’s salad.

So just a little, advanced planning with the backs of your seed packets will keep a nice steady supply of perfect fresh “local” vegetables on your table.  Fresh lettuce right from the garden is something beautiful to dream about during these cold winter days.