When it comes to gardening and taking care of your lawn, there are a number of go-to tips, such as making sure that your plants are adequately watered or placing your garden in an area of your lawn that receives maximum sunlight. One of the things that tend to overwhelm people when it comes to gardening maintenance, however, is weed control. In order to keep your weeds in control, you should follow a few helpful tips.
Let Sleeping Weeds Lie
The entirety of your garden is most likely covered in weed seeds. However, only the uppermost layer of your garden's soil will receive enough light to be able to germinate. Plowing around in your garden will insure that some of the seeds that are buried in the lower layers of the soil will make their way up top and will be able to receive enough light to germinate. It is recommended that you dig only when you need to and that you salve areas where you do need to dig with plants and mulch such that seeds will not be able to find an adequate spot to grow.
Use Mulch
Mulch is the perfect cure all for many of your gardening woes. One of the many things that it takes care of is weeds. Whenever you place mulch in your garden, you are ensuring that it keeps the soil, and ultimately your plants, nice and cool. Mulch also will deprive sunlight to areas of your garden, ensuring that weed seeds will not be able to germinate. Mulch is also good at keeping moisture inside of the soil, which will ultimately attract beetles, which will munch on the seeds of your garden weeds.
Pull When Wet, Hoe When Dry
This is an old gardening adage and, not only is it a nice quip, it is also infinitely true. After a good rain, you should set down a tarp, put on your best pair of gardening gloves and get to work on pulling out the weeds that have made a home in your garden. During dryer times, it is best to use a hoe. This is due to the fact that, during these dry times, weeds will make their home just above the soil. You can easily rake them and their shallow roots away with a hoe and your life will be made all the easier for it.
Top Chopping
If, for some reason, you are neither able to pull or hoe the weeds, you may want to opt for the next best thing: chopping their top off. Off with their heads! Although this might seem like a waste of your time since it still leaves the roots of the weed behind, it is anything but that. Chopping the top portion of weeds of will deprive it of its food supply and ability to adequately soak in an ample amount of light, making them grow more slowly and, sometimes, killing them completely.
Careful Spacing
When it comes to spacing your plants in your garden, careful spacing is key. Keeping plants spaced too far apart will give weed seeds plenty of space to grow and that extra room will mean that they'll continue to soak up a fair amount of sunlight. It is recommended that you keep your plants spaced fairly close together. This will ensure that weeds won't have access to the sunlight and nutrients they need to grow.
Weeds can be as royal pain, but that doesn't mean that they have to be. Hopefully, this brief article has shed some light on the process of removing these pesky plants. If you have followed tips for weed control and find that you still have problem weeds, you might want to call in a weed control professional to have them evaluate your weed problem or check out a site like http://snydersweedcontrol.com/.
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