Best way to remove weeds and grass from a garden?

[waxworm09]

We started our first garden this year. We tilled up a small area, about 8 by 10. After we tilled we planted seed a couple days later, and a couple days after that we had weeds and grass shoot up everywhere. We were told we should have used preen right after we tilled but its too late to use it now since the grass is already grown. What is the best way to remove all the grass and weeds? It looks pretty bad. Is there a chemical we should use or do we need to spend some time with the garden hoe? Im afraid if we use the garden hoe it will grow right back since it grew in so fast after tilling up the new garden. Thanks for any advice.

[harvey lee]

Every year, I till the garden, fertilize and plant. What I do to control weeds is to dump my grass clippings from my mower onto the garden all over up next to the plants. This has been great for weed control and it also helps the garden from drying out as the clippings help keep the moisture in the dirt as the sun does not shine on the ground. I keep the grass clippings about 3 inches deep and I have to put clippings on all the time to keep it deeper. One could use chemicals but I would rather not and with the clippings, I do very little as far as weeding the garden.

[fishersofmen]

I use Round-Up just be careful when you are spraying and everything will be fine. Plus it would be weird if our home grown produce didn't at least have a little herbicides in them like everything at the store.

[corncob]

Mulch heavily to prevent weed growth....I like to use alfalfa hay bales. It goes a long way when pulled apart and adds nutrients to the soil at the same time...Be careful not to use weedy hay or you will be replanting more weeds into the soil...I wouldn't use chemicals.

[nofishfisherman]

At this point I think the best option is to mulch like others have said and try to hand pick weeds as the pop up.

Really tilling up a new garden and planting right away isn't the best idea because you still have all of the live roots from everything you tilled up. Its just a matter of time before they all take hold and start growing again.

I tilled and planted a large garden for my mother in law (roughly 20'x40') and what I did was the summer before I laid out dark plastic over the planned garden area. This blocked out all light and rain and essentially killed the bulk of anything that was growing underneath. Then in the fall I pulled the plastic and tilled up the space. In the spring I tilled again and planted. Very little grass or weeds grew back. This of course takes some serious pre planning since you need to start the summer before you actually want to plant but it has proven to be rather effective way to kill the grass without having to use chemicals.

The garden is now heavily mulched with grass clippings to prevent any new seeds from taking hold.

[smurfy]

We started our first garden this year. We tilled up a small area, about 8 by 10. After we tilled we planted seed a couple days later, and a couple days after that we had weeds and grass shoot up everywhere. We were told we should have used preen right after we tilled but its too late to use it now since the grass is already grown. What is the best way to remove all the grass and weeds? It looks pretty bad. Is there a chemical we should use or do we need to spend some time with the garden hoe? Im afraid if we use the garden hoe it will grow right back since it grew in so fast after tilling up the new garden. Thanks for any advice.

preen would not allowed the seeds you planted to grow. its designed to not allow seeds to germinate. put preen down AFTER all your seeds you planted have come up.

[Down Deep]

I have a fairly large garden and I am reluctant to use chemicals to kill weeds. This is just a personal choice. I expect to find some emergent weeds so I just hoe them out and turn them over. If you keep on it you garden will have less and less seed year after year. Once I take care of the emergent early seeds it is easy to take care of whatever grows during the rest of the growing season

If you don't want to hoe then use the grass clippings or some other mulch. Remember that grass clippings are full of weed and grass seed so if you don't keep it fairly deep or skip it for a year you will end up with lots of weeds. One great benefit of the grass clippings is that it becomes a good source of compost once tilled in at the end of season and replenishes your garden. Remember the next season you will have to apply the clippings again before the previous years seeds emerge.

It is still early in the season and you still have time to till and reseed. Mound up your rows which will make it easier to take care of the weeds.

[Rip_Some_Lip]

I was thinking of trying the grass mulch technique. Does it matter if you have kind of a weedy yard? I do spot spray the dandelions since I don't have that many but not the other weeds. Sometimes the grass likes to start seeding out some within the week before I mow again. Is that going to be a problem? Thanks.

[fishwater]

One of my favorite methods to weed is to use a large propane torch; the Red Dragon brand are commonly available at places like Northern Tool, or Fleet Farm. If you're seeds haven't sprouted you can go fairly aggressively over the entire area, basically kill everything that is growing. If your seeds have sprouted, you can lay a segment of metal gutter, or something similar over the sprouts to protect them as you go.

Oscillating stirrup style hoes are also pretty handy. They are also commonly called scuffle or hula hoes. Ammann and Glaser make good ones. A good sharp bladed hoe will clean up a garden quick.

As far as mulch, I prefer oat straw. I have a trac vac grass collector that I use for collecting grass for border mulching, but I try not to put clippings into the cropping area.

[yoppdk]

Because weeds were so bad in our garden last year, I decided to mulch with straw this year. Just bought 3 bales ($6 ea) and used half of it to spread over our 20 x 30 plot. I figure I'll need to respread some later in the year. They say straw also makes a good soil amendment that can simply be tilled in at falltime. The key seems to be finding straw that is relatively weed/seed-free. Straw should also help maintain moisture in the soil so I won't need to water as often. We'll see ...

[Tom7227]

If you wanted to use mulch would you want to use straw or hay? Isn't straw made from rough grass areas and full of seed? But hay is made from softer grass areas and should contain less seed. Of course I am not a farmer and not much of a gardener but I thought someone may be able to help with this one.

I have used the grass clipping mulch and the one problem I had was that things got too thick and started to smell. You have to wait before you get it 3 inches thick in one spot. At least that was my experience.

[yoppdk]

Regarding seed in straw ... you can get 'seedless" straw, which is what I asked for and bought. The straw is somewhat stiff, but breaks down some as you walk over it and it weathers. Over time it works itself into the soil.

[Down Deep]

Straw is a much denser plant and doesn't break down very well. Quite awhile ago I did some dirt work and extended the useable yard space by 100' X75' At the recommendation of a friend I used straw to cover the lawn after seeding. When the grass took hold I raked up the straw and put it in my compost pile. It took that stuff 3 or 4 years to break down to useable compost. The residual straw left on on the lawn was laying there for a few more years. So I'm not so sure that straw is a good mulch for veggie garden.

I recently saw a gardening show on Utube and they were using shredded newsprint for mulch. The ink is made of vegetable oil so there are minimal toxins. The paper will break down in a single season. I looked like it did the job and held moisture very well. They spread it out and hosed it down and then showed a clip taken a couple weeks later and it was function perfectly. I thought I might try an area in my garden this year. Anybody every used newsprint?

[delcecchi]

Roundup will take care of stuff like quackgrass that is not controllable by any other means. If it is too close to your desired plants, use a brush or a rag on a stick to paint it on.

[SpitnArgueDuckClub*]

I put in a garden with pallets this year. Not the typical pallet garden you find with a gooogle search but one where I took each pallet and covered the top with black "weed stop" (stapled down and trimmed to the square of the pallet). I did this with 48 of them and placed them top down in rows of three spaced 3 ft apart top and bottom, and side to side (3 long rows and 16 short rows). So when you look at them you see a checker board look. I did this so I can use the troy built tiller and till all of the rows; essentially weeding all four sides of each pallet. In the pallets when placing plants I just cut a slit in the weed stop cloth and planted the plant. For rows of seed I cut out a row along the open slats of the pallet and planted the seeds. Weeding was my no 1 reason for doing this, the garden is on the family farm 30 minutes away so this way if I can get out there once a week I can till everything in an hour or so and keep the weeds down.

[Lines tight]

Straw is from oats or wheat stems. The head or seeds are harvested and the stems are baled and unless there are weeds in the field they are seed free. Hay consists of either alfalfa or grasses. Hay most likely will have seeds in them since the contain the whole plant and do not have the seeds harvested. We have both wheat straw and grass clippings in our garden. I like straw for in between the rows because it holds up to the foot traffic better then grass clippings.

[flipper]

I also like mulching in between my tomato plants with oat straw. I usually spread it out in the field in the fall because it may carry pathogens from the Tomatoes. Hay and grass clippings get too stinky IMHO.