Laying rocks and keeping weeds out!
sonic
20 years ago
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bananarama_1
20 years agolast modified: 9 years agoUser
20 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
Making Raised Beds Questions! Newspaper to keep weeds out?
Comments (4)I can't really say how deep but definetely more then a few inches! My guess is 8-10 inches or more. The book I had, showed pictures of it but I did figure it wouldn't really be that effective if maybe for the first year.(new seeds flying in from all over the world)I pulled all the weeds and their roots before covering with the newspaper. The least it can do is decay and add something to the soil right? I just tend to worry too much about chemicals getting into what I'm eating lol. If I didn't use mulch on my flower beds tho...I don't think I could keep up my fight against weeds LOL Three beds are/will be I think 12 feet by 6 feet. Two beds are/will be 9 feet by 5 feet. (My dad is building them so I don't say a word and let him do the dimensions lol) I have not really begun planning anything out officially but I would like to do tomatoes, peppers, an eggplant or two, corn, carrots and onions. God willing, I will have a total of 5 beds to work with. As far as room, we have almost an acre of crappy hills (i hate them. a slight slope would have been great but not these) with some flatter land. We had strawberry patches all over the backyard but we made a new bed for them in the front of the house which freed up the room for these raised beds! I wanna try pumpkin and watermelon but those will be on the back hill which we don't have much on besides some apple trees and rose of sharons :) ~michael...See MoreMarking perennials to keep from "weeding" them out come spring!
Comments (15)Ditto what Kevin says about leaving 6" or so of stems of late-risers when cutting things back in the fall - for me, that's largely the hardy hibiscuses, which don't re-appear here until June! Without the reminder of a few inches of old stems, there'd be no way to tell where they are. Actually, I leave a lot of clean-up to the spring, only cutting down things that might carry disease over in the foliage (e.g. peonies....), or that have seedheads that will deposit unwanted seedlings, or that have tall coarse stems that will be unattractive and messy when flattened by snow and wind. So it's pretty easy to see where most things are in spring simply by the mounds of dead foliage. The remains of the old foliage also helps protect the emerging new growth from the sometimes wildly fluctuating bouts of warm and cold spring temperatures! It's far too early here to be doing a bare-earth clean-up yet. A few 'bad' insect pests (mostly snails!) will overwinter in the foliage, but so do 'good' insects; on the whole, the balance favors the 'good' ones - but the situation might be different in your climate....See MoreAdvice on getting dead grass/weeds out of rocks
Comments (7)Flame weeders are very effective, and low cost, low labor solutions for this kind of situation. Red Dragon makes a good one, available on Amazon and other places. kimmsr is right that you do need to be careful not to start unwanted fires, but in our dry environment, this is the tool of choice for eliminating dead or live weeds in rock. It takes only minutes to do a garden bed, and the weeder will leave a clean looking surface that can be touched up easily with the weeder again as needed. I've seen these devices used on acre size lots full of weeds to great effect. If you have a weeder, you won't need to buy herbicide, and weeder will pay for itself quickly. Probably the greatest benefit I see is the labor: it would take me hours to weed even a relatively small area by hand, and I would need to be doing it again soon. The amount of propane needed is quite small, and easily compensated by the hours of your time saved. As noted above, soil gets into the rocks over time, and you would need to move and clean the rocks to even start to keep more from growing in the area. However, even this huge effort would be defeated over time as new soil and debris comes onto the rocks. The weeder helps to eliminate that debris. Renais...See MoreKeeping weeds out of my Irish/Scotch moss. Ideas?
Comments (2)The Preen will work with any weed seeds that may blow or drift in but it will have no effect on any existing weeds, so make sure you remove those manually. Including roots of perennial weeds like dandelions. Hand weeding is really the most effective way of addressing weeds in a dense, low growing mat-like groundcover like Irish moss. The moss itself offers a pretty suitable seed bed for new weeds and offers little suppression of more rooty perennial weeds....See Morerebow
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