Hi Jessica and welcome to your new found interest. Be careful though, gardening can easily and quickly become an obsession! lol

As to your weeds and only being organic situation......Well, my advice is give it lots of time, patience, persistence, cardboard/newspaper/paper bags, organic mulches and a stirup/hula hoe is a great tool. Vinegar is helpful in certain situations too.

I don't know the condition of your soil or the weeds you are facing. My biggest weed challenge is bermuda grass. Still, all the things I mentioned above are helping me deal with it.

I covered my veggie garden area for the first 2 fall/winters I was here with a thick layer of paper and then mulch. Now mind you, last year my garden results were horrible. This past fall the soil was weed free enough that I felt I could get away with only putting down a nice thick layer of shredded leaves and pine straw. My garden is finally looking promising this year!

I would imagine your situation is a bit different from mine as I would think your plot has been used in the recent past and it sounds like you have plants growing well already.

All I can say is this year hand weed as much as you can. The stirup/hula/scuttle hoe is a great tool for weeding young weeds in good soil. It is a hoe that goes by several names.

In the fall put down as thick a layer of organic mulch as you can. All in all though the key is persistence and the realization that there will always, always be weeds. Just hopefully as time goes on there will be fewer and fewer and they will be easier and easier to deal with.

Good luck!

Michelle

Layers of newspaper, not too thick covered over with hay will help. (Remember, don't go too thick because water will not be able to get through easily.)

A thick layer of hay by itself will help too.

Mother Nature sees bare soil as an "injury" of sorts. Anything bare needs to be covered.

We put bandages on our injuries, Ma Nature uses weeds.

This is probably too obvious to mention but I'll
do it anyway....

I've never been fond of the stirrup hoes but
thats just a personal choice, they work fine.
But I have always put and matained a verrrry
sharp edge on my other hoes and weeding isn't
much of a chore. Still have to do it but it
doesn't take too long. If you're having to hack
and hack at the ground to get the weeds out consider
taking a file and sharpening the edge.

I have a plot of vegetables in a commumnity garden that grows weeds in incredible variety and quantity. I see it as either a choice of trying to cover the ground with paper and mulch or keeping it bare and hoeing the heck out of it. I have been hoeing the heck out of it. I can skim the whole thing with a stirrup hoe in 30 minutes or so and just pull weeds in the rows. It is the pulling that takes a lot of time.

A few tips: if possible till it early and often. I think I did mine twice, and then did it again right before planting. The smaller the weeds are the easier it is to kill them. If you can stir them up when they are just little white roots that have not even gotten out of the ground, that is the best. I like the stirrup hoe for the same reason, it cuts under the surface and kills germinating weeds. I hoe everywhere with it, even the places that don't have weeds.

My other garden which I have had for several years I try to maximize compost and mimimize tillage and do things very differently, but in a community garden where you are inheriting someone elses problems I think it is easier to hoe it into submission.

You might laugh at this one but it works. I live in the pacific northwest and the weeds number in the millions. I would give up on gardening if it were not for mulches. I use black plastic for plantings and carpet strips in the rows.I use old carpet that has been sitting out for some years, cut it in strips and lay it bottom side down on the tilled ground. If not using plastic I usually part the carpet strips an inch and plant seeds there.I usually cut my strips 2'wide. The only weeding needed is in the planting strips. Water goes through the carpet and the carpet helps keep the moisture in. You would not believe how well this works. I also use cardboard etc to cover weedy areas. Someone suggested contaminants in carpet, but old carpet has gassed of some years ago and it beats the daylights out of any other mulch I have used. When the season is over, roll it up for next year. Any carpet store has dumpsters full of the stuff, just buy a carpet knife and a bunch of blades and it's an easy deal. It looks like I need a hosting site or I would post a picture.