You are assuming a herbicide is the solution? Not in a vegetable garden. In gardens a hoe and lots of mulch is the solution, not herbicides.

Dave

Yours is the usual problem in a new garden location. It has been reseeded with all kinds of things for years, decades and even more. Many of the weed seeds can survive 50 years, just waiting for enough light to germinate; so there are a lot of weed seeds there just waiting. Best response is probably a deep mulch plus constant reweeding. One of the reasons that old gardens often seem to throw fewer weeds is that long periods of cultivation have reduced the reservoir of seeds and have eliminated the perennial ones like johnson grass. Up here that would be quack grass and creeping jenny. New gardens start from scratch. Make sure that any open soil, gets turned frequently enough that new weed seedlings get stopped before they get a decent start. Just note that every time you turn the soil, you turn up more weed seeds. Eventually there won't be so many to worry about.

Besides there is no magic wand that does away with weeding the garden. The more time you spend in and with it the better it will reward you. No matter what adverts and some garden centers may tell you, chemistry is only the answer for fertilizer and then only if done carefully.

Lee - seriously, herbicides have no role in gardens. They can be, and often are, as detrimental to the garden plants as they are to the weeds, especially when used anywhere near a garden once it is planted. Even the fumes can drift and kill some plants. Even pre-emergents aren't as discriminating as they are advertised to be as many have learned the hard way when they discovered the soil unable to support crops for months afterwards.

Please reconsider your approach to garden weed control and do some more research in garden weed control. True it takes a bit more work especially for the first couple of years but that is true for all gardens and it truly does pay off in the long run.

Dave

Later this year we're having our first child so I'm thinking of downsizing the garden a bit next year as I won't have as much time to take care of it. Would a good weed control idea on the portion I'm going to keep fallow next year be to till it every couple of weeks... basically flush up as many weed seeds as possible but then till them up before they get big enough to produce seeds?

I find that for established gardens, it takes but a little while daily to keep the weeds under decent control. Remember: Seed 1 year and weed for 7.

You don't need to till your fallow every few weeks. You can just hoe it. Its called a stale seedbed. You till once and then wait for the weeds. Then you hoe wiht a Dutch hoe when they are just seedlings and you keep hoeing. Or you could mulch it with cardboard/newspaper and woodchips or some other organic material. Or you could just keep mowing over it.

With a small baby you'll be doing well to get dressed and brush your teeth before supper time each day. Don't stress about the garden. Good luck.

I agree with floral for the fallow part, I would put a thick layer of overlapping cardboard and several inches (maybe even 6 inches) of woodchip mulch to way it down. The weeds will not get the light they need to germinate and over time the cardboard will break down and feed the soil.

Congratulations on the upcoming new baby!!! Lee I just a couple days ago finished wheelbarrowing a humongous double truckload pile of free mulch from the tree company. My back yard garden is not large, but even so I don't spend a lot of time weeding. Mulching and the previous 5 years of weeding have helped.

Some people cover with black plastic for a season and then when the plastic is removed the weeds are pretty much gone and the soil is nice and soft and wormy.

Mulch mulch mulch mulch. Weeds that can't see sunlight don't get very far.

See my love letter to a Stirrup Hoe a few weeks back... like a weed eraser. Very minimal effort, fast. With 2 small kids and a long work commute, I need my gardens to be as "set it and forget it" as possible. Mulch is very good... I still use it in several beds... but now that I use my stirrup hoe a few minutes each week, my gardens have never been so weed free. Game changer for me. Especially in beds that see successive planting it's been helpful not moving mulch around to seed and feed.

The chemicals in some herbicides are among the worst to expose to a pregnant woman, a nursing mother, a child, or even a couple trying to get pregnant.

Thanks for the stirrup hoe suggestion, just got that at home depot. My garden plots are fairly large (probably .5 acres total), so some of the suggestions like all black plastic mulch would be prohibitively expensive.

Cardboard! Nancy

Roundup is killing what is there now it is not residual so you are getting a kill with new growth from plants not killed. preen or treflan is good for some crops grass control. If using herbicides read and follow directions and know what crops to use it on. careless usage and lack of product knowledge can be disastrous

I used to use a stirrup hoe and would agree with the recommendation but I switched to a combination of lasagna method of building a bed and Square Foot gardening. Because I tend to plant very close together in sections, I like a Cape Cod weeder or similar which is a hand tool. I rarely see them for sale so you would have to order one. I will drag it through soil to uproot emerging weeds like you would do with a stirrup hoe but with long runner root grasses, I tug the grass with one hand and use the weeder to pull up the long root.

We have creeping jenny that invades the squash bed when the vines start running. In the spring I cover the bed with black plastic which kills the creeping jenny making it easy to hoe out.

I have wide grass paths between my beds. I build a bed on existing thick sod starting with a layer of wet newspapers at least 6 sheets thick. Cover with grass clippings, then a layer of dried chopped leaves. Throw on kitchen scraps when available, and keep going until it's 24 inches high. It compacts over winter and becomes home to a lot of happy worms. In the spring, the bed gets a topping of composted manure. I had a source that mixed kitchen scraps and bedding in with the manure, turning it several times during the winter so by spring it was really nice. Some manure is too cake-y and lumpy. So first year, no weeds in the beginning and it's easy to keep new weeds out of the bed.

Since the wide grass paths contain running weeds, what is working is to have a trench cut around each bed. The mower can get closer to the bed so no weed whacking is required. If I have the time and the bed contains things that grow over the walkway (like summer squash), I surround the bed with newspapers topped with grass clippings. Keep in mind that I successfully built beds on top of weedy grass.

Some plants like potatoes and garlic can be thickly mulched. I use straw after hilling potatoes once with dirt. The garlic is planted in late October and thickly mulched with straw. The garlic grows up thru the straw, most of the weeds don't. I am having trouble this year with a vine, possibly wild morning glory but in general the garlic bed looks pretty good. The end of the bed is a thick mass of self seeding calendula. These also edge another bed where I am growing carrots and two kinds of beets. The veggies need very little weeding. All three rows are planted close together. There's a dirt path and then a metal trellis for sugar snap peas. On the other side of that are 4 hills of summer squashes/zucchini. It wasn't hard to keep that area weeded until the plants shaded out and grew together.

We did have to take massive renovation with a bed that I had let get overgrown. Once weeds were removed, new composted manure etc was added plus a new trellis fence for pole beans. On each side of the trellis is a variety of pepper plants. First year, hardly any weeds.

Weeds go into a weed pile, never the compost bin.

It sounds like you have a large garden but how much of it is dirt paths between the rows? You might do well with a mini tiller although I've decided not to till our soil. I find it a compromise to have wide grass walkways between the beds that are kept mowed. Because I rarely walk on the beds, I'm not compacting the soil. I love my spading fork. I use a square shovel for edging beds. Once my tomato plants get big enough to shade the space between them, I rarely see new weeds.

Why do you have grass paths? Is it easier than woodchips or gravel or anything else??

Probably just cheaper. I have considered reconfiguring the beds to make paths narrower and replace with something like gravel. The main path will have to remain wide as it gets cleared for winter access to the high tunnel. We also set up the high tunnel with double doors to allow access by tractor bucket if we brought in a big load of manure. So far, I have just amended sections of the HT beds as I've readied for a new crop. Grass paths are wide enough for riding lawn mower and John Deere tractor. I use a riding lawn mower without the mowing deck towing a cart with all my garden stuff. Garden stuff in the spring is frequently 5-gallon pails of composted manure. I have a garden cart with bicycle tires but don't use it much.

Green manure is something to consider for idle beds but I haven't tried it except for buying a large packet from Johnny's to try out.

Please don't use black plastic. Just the worst thing for the health of a garden. (Almost as bad as poisons.)

Since you probably won't have much time for gardening with a new baby, you could plant a crop of potatoes which will improve your soil.

I do not know why potatoes improve the soil like they do, but they do. (Maybe it's just a physical thing. They are said to 'break it up'.)

Make sure to buy 'seed potatoes' which are in fact real potatoes (not seed) and are virus-tested.

What is wrong with black plastic? I thought it helped warm up the soil in the spring. Also I am about to eat potatoes I just gree from the eyes of some supermarket Yukon golds. What's the problem with that?

There are different kinds of black plastic. Polyethylene and polystrene are good, and don't leach chemicals. Most black plastic sheeting is made of those materials. Polycarbonate leaches BPA, and it's wise to stay away from that. I don't think there are many black plastics these days that are made from polycarbonate, though. Best to be sure what kind of plastic you're using.

That being said, black fabric is permeable and makes irrigation a lot easier than black plastic.

'What is wrong with black plastic? I thought it helped warm up the soil in the spring.'

It would depend on its application. If it is used to warm soil, then that is not so bad. I am a bit allergic to the mere mention of the stuff. Maybe I over-reacted. It's use as a permanent weed suppressant is, in my opinion, appalling.

'Also I am about to eat potatoes I just grew from the eyes of some supermarket Yukon golds. What's the problem with that?'

Yes, potatoes can be grown from the eyes of a potato from the supermarket, but you might be introducing viruses into your soil.

That's an odd allergy. But I too would like to understand what's wrong with black plastic. I think it's wise to use the right stuff. I'd rather use mulch, but I can think of far more appalling things to do in a vegetable garden.

In the original post, "wait till seeds sprout and then use preemergent herbicide" Preemergent needs to be applied before or shortly after you plant your crops. If I use preen or treflan, I apply after tilling and incorporate it with a shallow tilling or rake it in. You know from the directions what crops to use it on and what not to use it on. Using black plastic or landscape fabric also works good , plant right down the middle of a 3' roll of it. and yes it can be costly but that is the price for time saved on weeding. Mulching with straw and grass clippings is good if you know the source of the clippings. I plant a lot of crops in 30" wide beds close enough together to eliminate most weed problems (radishes, lettuce, beets turnips etc). Also a quick trip down rows with tiller or a wheel hoe can keep weeds at bay.

'That's an odd allergy. But I too would like to understand what's wrong with black plastic. I think it's wise to use the right stuff. I'd rather use mulch, but I can think of far more appalling things to do in a vegetable garden.'

I am sure you can, dan.

But no, as I said above, I panicked. I thought the black plastic was taking up permanent residence.

In fact, heck, maybe I'll employ some this coming season to warm my tomato plants. Never done it before. Seems a good idea. But I am taking it off if it rains.

I think I can understand your allergy tete_a_tete. A friend told me she has trouble growing carrots but rejected all my advice about how I grow carrots. Right now I have only a stray weed in the bed that has closely planted carrots and two rows of two different varieties of beets. I probably didn't thin the carrots well enough but we're getting some nice baby carrots and beets right now. My friend planned to use black plastic of some sort to prevent weeds but all I can think of is suffocating the soil. She's only growing for one person so her small garden shouldn't require a lot of weeding. I do use black plastic to kill creeping jenny in the early spring because it only takes a few hours for it to creep into a bed and the winter squash bed gets neglected after the vines die down and squashes have been harvested. Some of my beds were built in 2007 (lasagna method) so I've built up some nice soil. I can see the difference in this dry season between a flower bed that never got a lot of compost and the veggie beds that get a lot. Dry powder in one, nice texture in the other and seems to be holding moisture better.

I can understand commercial use of plastic as part of weed control methods but I don't think most home gardeners need to use it much.