Last week I was at the pool talking to a woman I met not long ago. It looked like he was trying to bring order to the garden. Her and her husband's efforts were not enough to keep their garden free of weeds.
I don't know anyone else, but I'm not a big fan of weed. My mother, on the other hand, viewed weeding after a day of work as therapeutic gardening. After an hour or two in the garden, I still saw a smile on his face. When I realized I had a hard day at work, I came home and felt better a few hours later, that can serve as a reflection for all of us who have had a hard day and perhaps imagine how we get something else out of the ground. Since it's a new year, I hope I can give you some ideas for next year that you can implement to make you feel more comfortable in your garden.
I can safely say that weeding is one of my least favorite jobs in the garden and that most gardens do it poorly, be it the vegetable garden or the bed. In general, little is done to prevent weeds from appearing. When they become unsightly, we spend hours digging, digging and removing them by hand. When we're done with the last bed, we'll realize that the first one still needs help. For most of us, it has become an endless cycle. As a gardener, I would design beautiful beds for a homeowner and often come back years later to find the bed was overgrown. Normally it would break my heart to offer them our weed control service and then a way to protect their investment in the future. Removing weeds from a bed that was nice and clean a few years ago may seem a little selfish, but it usually happened after I gave them some tips on different ways to control weeds. After all, my reputation was at stake if someone came into a particular house and saw weeds on one of my projects.
As you can imagine, there are many ways to solve a weed problem. The traditional method of weed removal is to loosen up the garden. My sister married a tomato farmer in Harrow, Ontario and helped dig. What surprised me was his special hoe. He told me that his teams could make up ground pretty quickly. I saw a Dutch hoe, a hoe, a spade and a bow. Chemicals can also be used to kill weeds, which I generally reject. Commonly used mulches were weed control mulches such as black polyethylene, woven polypropylene, cardboard, and old carpet. Typically I have used a variety of wooden decking such as: E.g. double chopped hardwood decking, milled decking, cedar decking, pine decking and others. I've been loving gravel in the bed lately, but you can also find white gravel chips, chalcopyrite, lava rock and more. All of these methods have their advantages and limitations.
My favorite method of weed control is what you might call a cover crop. There are two different ideas when it comes to this type of plant. Catch crops have recently been increasingly used in home gardens. My advice is to control weeds in a garden border or flower bed with a ground cover. When designing borders or flower beds, I selected perennials that grow quickly or gave weaker perennials a chance to establish themselves in the first year and then added a ground cover. Some of the ground covers I used were very specific to the purposes I designed them for. Most ground covers grow low and have attractive flowers. In my projects I will not completely cover the clumps with soil, but rather leave a small gap that can fill up too quickly. I would plant tall perennials and then ground covers. Most often the basic ideas of spacing between perennials applied.
There are many good ground cover alternatives to traditional grass. For example, I have a low-growing bamboo that looks like grass and works well in dense shade. No grass could withstand such a dense shade in front of these bamboo trees. A boring corner in spring can become an interesting addition to the landscape with blooming myrtles. I border paths with low-growing perennials and avoid traditional beds. Basically, you reduce garden maintenance costs by having good ground cover that blocks sunlight and prevents weeds from germinating. Keep in mind that some ground covers can distract from your garden. This is a good reason to hire a designer to look at your project. The most common ground cover plants include myrtle/magnate palm, pachysandra, lily of the valley, sedum, phlox and many others. If you write to me I will do my best to link you to the Mulch blog.
I hope you had a lovely walk through your indoor and outdoor garden this week. If you have any problems, please let me know and email me at ericlarson546@yahoo.com. I will do everything I can to help. I will post a link to my website ohiohealthyfoodcooperative.org soon. Thank you for participating in our column.
Erik Larson of Jeromesville is an experienced landscape architect and garden enthusiast and a founding board member of the Ohio Chapter of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers.
This article originally appeared in the Mansfield News Journal: Use ground covers to control weeds in flower beds.
