Read what Kimmsr wrote again. It's right on the mark. "The best mulch material to use is that which you can get at the least cost..." Check things out around you. It's amazing sometimes what you will see and find and get if you ask. All my leaves get blown away in the fall, but a mile down the road my neighbours will gladly give me their leaves. One neighbour has a nice stand of pine trees. He used to rake underneath them and throw out all the needles until I asked him for them. All I do is supply the garbage bags for them and go get the bags. My neighbours on the opposite side of the road use to complain about the seaweed washing up on their beaches but now they don't since I go get it for mulching particular beds and for my compost. I collect used coffee grounds on the way home every day. The owner of the establishment where I get them from cut his organic pick-up fee by 1/2 and is most pleased to see me. The following is mulch which I created with used coffee grounds (UCGs), pine needles, and shredded leaves. The following is a photo of the gardens where it was applied. I never had to weed this area the whole season. :O) Mind you, I weeded before placing the mulch and I don't do the newpaper things to snuff any weed seeds, but placing a good 3 inches of this mulch works well. If the plants were further apart or I was not introducing new plants to the gardens all the time, then I might be inclined to put newspaper down. I must agree with those who speak negatively of landscape/weed fabric. One experience in my parents' gardens showed me that it can be more of a pain than anything else. It provides no food value to the soil and will permit rhizomaceous weeds to creep underneath until they see a way out and by that time your problem is more than you'd like.

This looks like "wild" aster, the kind with small white or blue flowers. I wouldn't keep it in my garden, plenty of other nicer plants. And Yes, I would consider it weed.

Wild grape and Chinese wisteria growing like MORE than just weeds. Sometimes I think Monmouth County is just one big Chinese Wisteria farm run amok. I hack at them every week or so pulling up underground vines as far back as I can get them up out of the ground but it's a losing battle. Maybe it's because this is my first year gardening so I'm actually noticing but there seems to be more pests of every kind this year...flying, crawling, burrowing, slithering and walking on 4 legs eating everything in their path above and below ground. I even had a Peahen who just began making a weekly appearance start eating my Alyssum which took forever to bloom from seedlings! My own fault because I felt sorry for her and thought she might be hungry. I threw a tiny bit of cracked corn on the ground for her to eat. The way her head whipped around when she heard that corn hit the driveway and how close she let me get to her tells me she belongs at a farm on the other side of a county road outside my father's neighborhood...not a starving wild foundling I need to help survive! She had her corn and my flowers. Didn't respond to yelling and clapping so I had to shoo her away until next time. This is a not-so-funny newbie weed example. My father found some Chinese Forget-Me-Not seeds in his car which were within package date. I sowed them in bare spot at top of driveway just for a little throwaway color. Green starts sprouting and I keep watering seedlings for a few weeks. As I'm cutting back baby vine foliage around seedlings one evening my father tells me they look like weeds. I say, couldn't be...denial. Finally I take a stem and compare it to the weeds I've been pulling out of the Bearded Iris for weeks. Yup...same weeds instead of Chinese-Forget-Me-Nots. It's combination Quack grass & "Nimblewill" far as I can tell. Yank some more and still a bare spot at top of driveway since 4 legged critters ate every single Cosmos seedling I planted there three times. Direct sowed some seeds but birds got them. I have tons of mulch on everything but I have the sinking feeling I'm not going to fully understand the meaning of rampant selfseeding and weed seeds breaking dormancy until NEXT year...LOL. Those cute little kidney shaped leaves I thought were some kind of wild ginger were correctly identified for me by someone on a forum as Garlic Mustard. In Spring I hand pulled them from one side of the house for 7 hours. They'd overwintered as cute little "ginger leaves" and grew into upright weeds with white flowers but I never made the connection. Have to pull and put in garbage because seeds still viable if just dumped in woods or composted. Now it's all over the place moving further and further along although Rutgers Extension weed ID site says it's "not yet a problem in cropping areas." The seed cycle is 5-7 years for eradication! How about the way all these aggressive weeds have destroyed the understory of woods and allowed other weeds to take their place instead of natives? The side of house where I pulled all upright Garlic Mustard is now covered in some other upright weed that's not Pokeweed but I can't identify it. Some other Jersey girl asked for identification on another forum but I don't think it's been identfied yet. Well, since I've been checking forums I've delayed by well over an hour watering all those darn containers that were my alternative to making any more new beds in cement clay and seedlings still needing attention. Besides, I think I've used up my "whoa is me" whining quotient for the day! :)

Wow! Talk about troubles! My house was broken into last Wednesday and all my time went to that. But here we are... Thistle is easy after it bolts (shoots upward). All you need is a shovel. Stick the shovel into the base and push through severing the top growth from the ground based rosette. Done. Check back in a week for any regrowth and repeat where needed. For the rest of the weeds in the St Augustine, you'll need a product with atrazine. Here's one of them you can find at Walmart. Read the entire instructions, twice, and follow them carefully. This is not the sort of stuff you want to walk through or let your pets into. It is also not an immediate kill, but in 2-3 weeks everything but the St Aug will be brown. And be sure to only aim this at the lawn. Don't get it on your ilex or crepe myrtles. I'm going to ask you how often you water the lawn, but I'm going to predict your answer and explain what you need to do to cure your weed problem. You were going to tell me you water every day. Why did I say that? Because you're in FL. Everyone there waters daily. Daily water is exactly what the weed seeds need to germinate. Established turf, on the other hand, doesn't even nearly need water that often. I did an experiment with St Augustine located on the eastern edge of the Texas desert. I stopped mowing (to develop deep roots) and as much as I could, I stopped watering. I started the project in Oct 2011. To date there is about 1,000 square feet which I have not watered even once. It has been 42 months, including a very severe drought and not much else until last fall, since I watered that area. All it has received is rain. As it turns out this part of the grass is in full shade, but the point is, you do NOT have to water as frequently as the Florida lawn industry tells you. What we tell everyone is to water deeply (meaning 1 full inch all at one time) and infrequently (meaning NEVER to water every day). Infrequently depends on the temperature. If the temp is below 70, then infrequently means to water once a month. If the temperature is in the 90s (like most of FL for most of the summer), then water once per WEEK. But always water the full inch. This schedule allows the surface of the soil to completely dry out. When the surface is dry, most weed seeds cannot germinate. The second thing you should be doing on the St Augustine is mowing at the mower's HIGHEST position. There is never any reason to lower the mower deck for St Augustine. I sometimes tell people to weld it in place so your well-meaning neighbor kid doesn't try to do you a favor and cut it short. Tall grass develops deeper roots and provides much more shade to the soil helping to moderate the soil temperature. Weed seedlings also need sunlight to grow, so if you shade the surface, any weed seeds that sprout will have a hard time growing. If I had a mower to do it, I would wait until the grass got to 12 inches and then mow it back to 9 inches tall. The grass in my experiment is almost waist deep at this point. We've had a wet fall, winter, and spring. I emptied 7 inches of rain out of the gage in the past month. That's really rare. So in addition to deep infrequent watering, mow it high to minimize weeds. If you are doing those two things, you should never have a problem with grassy weeds. You might still get the occasional dichondra or other broadleaf weed, so keep the atrazine handy from year to year. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.