Haha. When I saw your subject line, I thought you must have driven by our house! I have finally realized that I need to just run a continual loop around the yard and beds. By the time I finish one area, it is time to get back to the previous areas. No problem. Of course, I am not sure how to work in house cleaning and maintain the necessary schedule. Perhaps a day and a night shift are needed.

Wonder how I will work it once school starts again in a month. Sigh.

Cynthia

I know!! It IS a constant loop - even two of us are not keeping up and it is too hot to weed today 95 in the shade.

Nancy.

Lol at your comments on weeds though i shouldn't laugh,..i never had a weed problem until this summer all due to bird seed dropping around the garden,..strange wee plants emerged and most i had never come across before,..perhaps i should have left some grow as they might have produced something interesting,..like Sunflowers or something attractive but they were coming up in places i didn't want to take a chance with,..you have my sympathy with weeds and the rate they grow.

Philip

You do get some interesting flowers from bird seed - I tend to put feeders in areas that its not important if they go crazy. I don't put feeders out cause we have too many hunter cats in the neighbourhood - I don't want to provide a buffet for them. I remember the millet my Mum used to get in the dog run was neat!!

Nancy.

Mulching with a relatively low-weed-seed mulch such as straw, pine straw, hot compost, wood chips, etc. will cut down on weeding considerably, especially if you use a thick layer and/or fold newpaper to fit between your plants. I have to renew it every three years or so, but it really cuts down on the weeding in a major way.

Good tips there nhbabs,
Where i live there are only three houses and i am in the middle,..neither neighbor does any gardening but luckily one neighbor lets me plant any surplus plants i have plus i get rid of the weeds should they decide to head my way,..sadly my other neighbor has that awful Vine Weed and lots of it,..years ago i decided to put up a line of garden felt 4 ft high and sunk it in the ground 12 inches,..the felt being black would mean that the Vine Weed would not grow towards the dark but head the other way towards the light,..it worked but looks a tad strange when you see it in a picture as below.

Philip

I'm constantly fighting weeds too, grass are some of the worst. I have had some success with putting down 6 layers of newspaper around the plants for a barrier, then mulching with wood chips or bark. Then the grass can't come back quite so well. Some areas I have reduced the weeds and grasses a lot by letting some thick ground covers come in and take over. Some ground covers can't seem to block grass though. That would depend on what kind of plants you are trying to grow there.

one years seeds are seven years weeds-which seems unfair-miss one milkweed and you have to start all over again-perennial bindweed is the worst and the cats keep bringing the seeds back home-patricia thorpes american weekend gardener claimed weeds were ok but i feel she must have had vision problems.

Funny, David. :)

same here. i try to keep up with it over the weekend. i also do a quick 5 minute weeding - yep, around 5 minutes - when i get home work, which is usually around 7pm. if you do a little bit every day, it's not as overwhelming.

lol - 5 minutes here would get one crab grass plant - but I know what you mean. We keep pushing at it a bit at a time. We have so many annuals and biennials that reseed that mulch wouldn't work.

David, I always heard that a weed was just a flower that was where you didn't want it - but grass is a whole other thing. lol. I'd be happy with milkweed!!

Nancy.

Nancy, I had the grass problem at a former home and I always thought I should write a book..."The grass only grows in my garden" but after the title I had no idea what I'd write about, lol! I mulch my flower beds with shredded red cedar and my huge veggie garden with two sheets of newspaper and about 4 inches of grass clippings. Mulch is the only way to go! I just spent four days weeding my two new beds outside the new yard fence, grass and other goodies, and immediately went for a pickup load of the cedar mulch. In the fall, I stir the mulch with a five or six tine steel rake when doing my garden cleanup and the seeds I want to reseed usually come up through the mulch the next year. I've done it that way for years. Mulch makes even pulling grasses much easier as it keeps the soil moist so the roots don't go down so deep.

Where I want self-seeders, I leave parts of the garden unmulched, but mulch other parts. Particularly if I take the time to harvest a few seed-heads and sprinkle them on the unmulched patches my annuals and biennials come up just fine, but I only have to weed parts of the bed, not the whole thing. I have two kinds of annual grass that seed around a fair amount and have discovered that I either need to get them young or else take a pair of old scissors and cut them just below the base of the plant at the top of the roots. Otherwise my hands get quite stiff and sore since the roots are tenacious.

Nancy I hear you. I've been dealing with more weeds this year = especially that nasty crab grass that sprouts every few days. I'm also dealing with an outbreak of stinging thistles..

ouch Ianna - I 'found' some stinging nettle the other day - reminded why I wear my gloves to weed - except when I don't. You know it looked familiar, but I forgot what it was - now I remember. Most of life's lessons are painful.

Nancy.

Ugh I feel your pain. I feel like that's all I've done since the beginning of July! I have a young garden so there are very large gaps in between everything still....hoping when things mature and I'm able to plant things denser that it won't be so awful. I put mulch down but I need a lot more of it, it's too thin.

Also - thank you for giving me a name for the crab grass!

I was just wondering what that was today. At least that comes out easily for me though. I have some weeds that I have to dig up or the roots stay behind and mock me.

crab grass does come out easily but they sprout too quickly - I found that if I am vigilant, the moment they germinate, I simply kill them off by using my digging tools to disturb the soil and its enough to do the job-- that is if the sun is high and there's no rain.. But it's been too cool and rainy this summer hence that I suspect is causing the outbreak.

Anyway, to quickly get the weeds out, wet your soil, then use a pitch fork to loosen the soil, then pull out the weeds. They should be able to come out complete and easily.

With those stinging thistles, I have a bigger dillema as these have found their way into hard to reach areas. Also my neighbor (bless her) thought she was doing us a favour by having placed cracked stone to cover up the space between our homes (close property here). Well cracked stone will only kill off existing weeds temporarily and as we seasoned gardeners know.. weeds will germinate atop these things and then the cycle begins again but this time harder to remove because of those rocks. Better to control these things using wood mulch as these can be changed each year.. Too much work now -- might even need to have it done professionally to remove those rocks.

ianna - thanks for the tip. I didn't even think to wet the soil before digging them up. What a great suggestion. Seems so obvious now that you say it. :o)

Michaela

oh, Ianna - I used to use pea stone a lot for paths - sure learned to put under-layment down quickly.

Nancy.

nancy,

My neighbor had done that. The weedcloth topped off with the stones. It doesn't deter young germinating weeds from growing. In fact, soil accumulated atop the gravel enough to sustain more weeds. I've seen weeds penetrate the cloth into the soil below.. come to think of it, I've seen dandelions looking quite healthy in the middle of a concrete highway..

Anyway I just spent today in wet rainy weather trying to remove the jungle that sprouted there this season and I only managed a fraction and already filled 2 leaf bags.. Digging down is not possible because its quite stony.

Weeds will also find a way to grow on any surface so make it easier for yourself to remove them by using shredded wood mulch.

I've had a bumper crop of weeds this year and they haven't been that hard to pull out except that the fire ants don't like you disturbing their nests. This past weekend I got two stings on my left hand, one on my right wrist, one on my left knee and two in my right knee. they form a blister that itches like crazy for about a week. I did get a lot of weeding done and the fire ant stings don't make me sick like they used to. But they do itch more when you go back out in the heat.

Yuck, fire ant stings are not nice, I feel for you seamommy, I was stung by some kind of wasp last week, my hand didn't swell up too badly but oh the itch afterward it just about drove me crazy.
Here the weeds seem to change each year, up until now it was mostly couch grass and buttercup for me, this year it's knotweed and milk weed ( the one with the white sap ), I just read somewhere where the sap from this weed has been known to cure some skin cancers, also used for warts.

Annette

I love milkweed -- if we had it I'd give it space. It has fragrant flowers and attracts all the right customers, if you know what I mean.
I cannot imagine working around fire ants - ewe have lots of bees this year. Yea. On the down side' the Chihuahua puppy was stu g by so ethi g and she looked like a shar-pei. Not pretty.

Nancy.

Weeds are never avoidable for me.
They always grow two or three times faster than what I want.
Mulch does help, and cuttings of branches, etc, are heaped up, because I have the room, and then my chopper, mulch machine is dragged out for a noisy, messy half hour or so.
A huge pile of brush becomes an amazingly little bit of mulch.
Weeding campaigns go on about 2x times with me laying down a bamboo rod, pulling every weed on the left of it, moving it and continuing. That is in the main perennial bed.
Weeds got so bad in the rock garden that I lifted every valued plant, potted it up, pulled out the rocks and used weed killer. Then I reconstructed it. It's been two years since then, and the perennials are dominant, but I still must go there and go over it, periodically, for weeds.

Sea mommy and Annette - witch hazel is great for itches of all kinds. I've use it for black fly and moszie bites, as well as poison ivy. I just kind of 'flow' it on. Sadly does not work for stinging nettle though.

Nancy.

I have to agree with using newspaper and mulch. Using weed cloth was a huge mistake for me. Essentially, it was ok the first year after I put it down with a thick layer of mulch on top. The next year though, it seemed that as the mulch broke down, it just created a layer of dirt on top of the weed cloth that allowed everything to just grow over it..

I have been finding pieces of that weed cloth for years now whenever I try to plant something and no matter how much I pull it out, there seems to be more..

The best method is to lay down layers of wet newspaper at least 5 sheets thick and cover with mulch.

I agree with mulching. I worry about extending my garden beds due to the wild violets. We managed to pull the bulk out of the front bed, but it took an entire summer. My in-laws were visiting and bored during the day so would go out and dig down to the roots. They are persistent buggers! I have followed up this year by putting a second layer of thick mulch and taking any foliage off in order to starve the roots. Beside the stray leaf and weeding a lot before the mulch was put down, I have barely needed to weed. Whatever does grow through is weakened by having to push through the mulch.

My lawn is almost 100% weeds dispite reseeding every Spring and Fall. I am planning on reseeding the lawn soon for the fall and then placing the feed pellets as an organic preemergent in the Spring. Might help with the garden, too if the lawn stops being one huge weed.... :)

I won't be posting pictures anytime soon....why try to 'find Waldo' I mean my roses, in the weeds? LOL

Now that it's cooling off, maybe I can try to find my flowers again.

Lavender Lass, good to 'see' you here :). This forum has been pretty slow lately, a lot of the use to be regulars are missing in action. Mind you I'm guilty of it too, I'll try and post more often, anyways, glad to see you back. I really miss seeing pictures of all the beautiful gardens.

Annette

Annette & Lavender Lass - I've never been a regular poster on this forum as you've both been over the years but I, too, miss the activity. I check the forum daily in hopes of seeing a return to those active postings but haven't noticed an uptick the past year or so.

And now that the corrugated cardboard under my 6 inches of bark mulch have finally disintegrated, the weeds have pretty much declared open season on all my carefully designed garden beds. I can only be grateful they're all now, finally established so the weeds may have a fight on their hands.

Pulling weeds is therapeutic. I'm becoming a very calm person!!!

LOL

Valree- Very theraputic!

Annette and Gardenweed- It's been a crazy summer and my garden has been neglected. I'm hoping things will calm down. Maybe as the summer winds down, more people will be checking in to the forum :)

Yes Valree3- I pulled two bushels of weeds before I brushed me teeth this morning ! I go into a trance & can't stop- started at 7 and came in at noon.. Very satisfying to know they're gone ... For a day or two...

I've had to edge my beds three times this season on account of grass and weeds growing into the mulched borders. In fact I'm working on the third round this weekend, going out again here soon. Instead of dragging the edger out these last two times, I'm just hand pulling all away around. I hope I don't have to do it again before winter.