What about growing a ground cover? Later you can till it in.

V.

Cover the area with newspaper and cover the paper with a good mulch to hide and hold the paper in place. Both of these will, eventually, add organic matter to the soil as well as help suppress the "weed" growth.

cardboard and mulch, that's how I got the weeds in my edible garden area under control.

So far I've had to do very little weeding this year and what weeding I have had to do the hula/stirrup hoe has handled with ease.

Of course this is after 2 or 3 years in a row of putting down the cardboard/mulch in the fall. Finally last year I was able to get away with just putting down shredded leaves and coffee grounds, no paper products or bought mulch. Loved it! Much easier and cheaper:)

mulch and lay it on thick, use one of the green type mulches like spoilt hay's lucerne or fodder grass etc.,. sugar cane mulch would do the trick also.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

tons of mulch. Uncovered ground doesn't remain uncovered for long so if you won't be covering it with plants, cover it with mulch.

Thanks for all the feedback. The ideas are helpful as we work to figure out what would be best for the care of the garden.

Green manure seems the way to go if its not going to be used for a couple of years.

Plant buckwheat, winter rye, clover, mustard, others, and cut once or twice a year. This will build up your soil better, cheaper, and with less work than by using mulches (as long as you are not going to use the area).

If it doesn't look too bad to you, often the weeds that grow are exactly the green manure that your soil needs. Nature rebuilds itself for free if we leave it alone.

Kyle

The newspaper and paper idea sounds like a good one. :)

This is just coming from a novice gardener, but another thing one could do is simply place a bunch of bags of soil onto the area, and it just kills everything there if you leave it, lol.

I'll try the newspaper myself. Will it works over the winter? Probably...

I like the no till method of putting down cardboard/paper and mulch and then later planting in compost that I put in the mulch. Unfortunately, here in central FL, there are plenty of weeds that will happily grow right in the mulch and even right through the cardboard after the rainy season.

Anyway, the mulch is a good way to kill off grass/weeds in prep for a planting area but to improve your soil for the future when you may wish to plant it again, some sort of living mulch (cover crop) that will improve the soil while helping to keep other weeds at bay would be a good choice. It might be worth while to make it easier to get a mower inside the fence for these fallow years so the cover crop can be mowed.

Remember, a plant is only a weed if it is growing where you don't want it and most weeds are useful in some way or another.