How to Get Rid of Weeds in Gardens and Raised Beds
How to Get Rid of Weeds in Gardens and Raised Beds
While gardening can normally be a fun activity, weeding makes it a real hassle, especially if you’re strapped for time during the summer months. Leaving weeds too long also damages your plants, since the weeds rob them of light, water, and nutrients and encourage pests and diseases. This naturally leads to a decreased return on all the hard work you put into raising them!
While you’ll always have a few weeds to deal with, there are some preventative measures you can take to significantly reduce the amount of time you spend weeding – and improve your gardens’ health at the same time! Here are the best options:
Mulching
Mulching is the single best thing you can do to prevent weeds in your garden, raised beds, flower beds, and any other area where bare soil is present. A physical barrier of natural mulches keep the soil covered so that weeds can’t receive enough light to grow. Mulch helps the plants retain water and can prevent diseases passed from the soil to the plant. Best of all, the mulch will naturally decompose over time and add organic matter to the soil, improving your garden’s health even more.
There are many types of mulch to choose from. Use 3-6 inches of most natural mulches for the best success. If you’re using paper-based mulch products, one or two layers is usually enough.
Bark Mulch and Wood Chips
Bark mulch and wood chips are great for a long-lasting weed barrier and are most commonly used around perennials, like blueberries, roses, and trees. Wood mulch also works well for pathways between sections of the garden or raised beds.
Add a thick layer of mulch about 6 inches deep in spaces where you don’t want anything to grow, and add more as it decomposes over time. You can also add landscape fabrics underneath for an extra weed protection barrier.
Dead Leaves
Dead leaves make another good mulch, but they’re easiest to collect in fall (for obvious reasons) and dump on your garden to prevent an early weed crop in spring. By the time spring rolls around, they’re usually composted enough that you can just work them into the soil. You can use leaf mulch at other points of the year, but it may blow around.
Hay/Grass Mulch
Hay mulch is a good mulch that will easily compost around annuals, BUT: it normally has grass seeds in it that can work their way into the soil and cause more problems later on. For this reason, I generally wouldn’t recommend it.
Grass clippings can make a decent mulch, but they have the same problem with potentially spreading more seeds and leading to future weed growth.
Cardboard Mulch
For my money, cardboard is the best garden mulch to prevent weeds year round. There’s zero risk of it adding weed seeds to the garden, and there’s also no chance for weeds to grow through it except on the very edges of its coverage area.
If you do a lot of online shopping like my family does, you probably have quite a bit of it around. It’s easy to break it down into a single layer (unlike others, you won’t need inches of mulch in this case, just one or two layers) and lay it between rows or cut out holes for the plants to grow through. You can use cardboard like landscape fabric and add a natural mulch like wood chips on top if you prefer.
In winter, you can throw whole broken down boxes over sections of your garden or raised beds to prevent weeds in spring. Then, come spring, pull them off, dump them on a compost pile, and resume working. Here are more ways to use cardboard in the garden.
Newspaper Mulch
You can also use layers of newspaper as mulch, but in today’s world we tend to have less of it, and in my experience it doesn’t work quite as well as cardboard. If you have a bunch of old newspapers lying around, definitely try using them, though!
Cover Ground with Black Plastic
Similar to mulching, covering the ground with a black plastic tarp or heavy duty landscape fabric can kill off the weeds underneath. This is a good option for the end of the season in fall, when you won’t have anything growing in the garden and want to prevent any weeds from getting a head start in spring. You can also use this to kill off grass to make a new garden site.
Avoid Moving the Soil
You may not need to rototill your garden every year, especially if you use a raised bed or another gardening method that avoids compacting the soil. Moving the soil around can encourage weeds by planting them at a depth they can grow in (as opposed to sitting on the soil surface or being buried too deeply underground), so avoid unnecessary stirring if you can help it.
If you do need to till, the next best thing to do is cover it with mulch or a plastic tarp as soon as you finish tilling. Once you’re ready to plant, you can uncover the top of the soil in the area you’re planting in.
If you’re not using a section of your garden for the summer, cover it with mulch, black plastic, or one of the other options mentioned rather than letting it sit. Leaving open ground is a sure way to get a crop of new weeds in a hurry.
Check New Plants for Weeds
New plants from a nursery or other garden center may have weeds in them already. Check the soil carefully before transplanting for any sprouts or noticeable seeds.
Grow Plants Close Together
Use the proper spacing guidance recommended for your plant variety – but don’t go with more than it suggests! Keeping the plants closer together gives weeds less light and space to pop up into. For large plants, it can be helpful to grow them in a grid or triangular pattern rather than a row.
Use Properly Composted Fertilizers
Certain fertilizers, like cow manure, may contain weed seeds that passed through the animal intact. Use compost or manure that has been heated to at least 140 degrees, which kills weed seeds.
Water Just the Plant
Weeds love water – they grow back seemingly overnight after a rainstorm. But you may have also noticed that during dry periods, they grow with a little less fervor – making them much easier to maintain!
While you can’t prevent rain from reaching the weeds unless you use a plastic mulch cover, you CAN help reduce weeds by using an efficient watering system: watering just the base of the plant. This can be time consuming, I know, but it does work. Just water a row or one specific plant, and do so on the soil as close to the base as possible.
Not only will this help prevent weeds, but it can also improve your plants’ health, since overhead watering often leads to diseases.
Try Cover Crops
If you can’t beat them, join them: planting cover crops is like a weed for weeds, and prevents the weeds from getting the space and nutrients they need to take over your garden. The best ground cover plants to prevent weeds include buckwheat, clover, rye, and oats.
Cover crops are generally a good option for winter and points when you may have a bed or section of the garden sitting dormant for a while – not the best option for most active gardens, except for a few low-growing varieties that you can plant around the bases of certain plants as ground cover companion plants.
Just make sure you till them into the soil or remove them before they start producing seeds – otherwise they’ll become a weed themselves.
Pull Weeds Early & Often
When you do inevitably get a few weeds, pull them as soon as possible. They’re easier to remove when they’re small, and they’re also less likely to have gone to seed, which is what ultimately causes the problem to return day after day and year after year.
Here’s how to do it best: Pull them out completely, all the way to the root, using a digging tool if you have to for deep roots like dandelions. Consider wearing gloves, since some, like stinging nettles, can stab you and leave you with alternating waves of pain and numbness. Avoid disturbing the soil more than necessary. Take the pulled up weeds far away from your garden for composting.
I find keeping a set schedule helps. While checking on your garden and doing a little weeding to remove small weeds every day is great, I often find that once a week (on the same day every week) is enough for most gardens. By weeding regularly, it only takes an hour or so to get through our five large raised beds.
I like to do it first thing in the morning while the soil is damp from the dew and it isn’t too hot. You may want to add an extra weeding day in if it recently rained, since the rain encourages more weed growth (and it also makes the ground moist and easier to pull from!)
Herbicides
While it’s normally best to avoid herbicides in an area where you’re growing plants you actually want, some types of herbicides can still work without damaging your flowers, vegetables, or fruits. Pre-emergent herbicides prevent the seeds from sprouting. Naturally, you shouldn’t apply this when you’re actively planting, or your plants won’t grow either, but you may have some success using them once your garden plants are close to mature.
Avoid post-emergent herbicides that you spray on weeds to kill them. While these herbicides are effective, they can also easily spread to your vegetable crops, flowers, and other plants you want. Herbicide use can hurt organisms in the soil and adds unnecessary chemicals to the soil and your food supply.
FAQs About Weeding Gardens and Raised Beds
How do you keep weeds out of your vegetable garden?
The best ways to keep weeds out of gardens and vegetable beds is to avoid as much soil disturbance as possible, use mulch, plant and water efficiently, and check for weeds regularly.
How do I kill weeds in my garden without killing vegetables?
The only sure way to kill weeds without killing vegetables is to pull each one out by hand.
Why does my vegetable garden have so many weeds?
Gardens generally have excessive weeds due to not being weeded quickly enough (and letting previous weeds go to seed) and using fertilizers and mulches that carry additional seeds into the garden.
Does mulch prevent weeds?
Yes, mulch prevents weeds. Using wood chips, dead leaves, cardboard, or another type of mulch around your plants is one of the best ways to keep weeds from growing up through the soil beneath.
Can I spray weeds in my vegetable garden with vinegar?
You can, but it isn’t likely to do much and isn’t an effective way to get rid of them. The weeds will just grow back unless they’re pulled out all the way to their roots.
Are weeds bad for vegetable garden?
Yes, weeds are bad for vegetable gardens. The weeds steal sunlight, water, and nutrients that your vegetable plants need to grow.
Can you spray Roundup in vegetable garden?
It’s not a good idea to use a weed killer like Roundup in a vegetable garden or near fruits. Try to use natural and organic weed control methods before resorting to chemical weed killers.
How do I get rid of invasive weeds in my flower beds?
The best way to deal with aggressive weeds in flower beds is to use wood mulch, but this works best for large perennial flower beds. Other options for annual and mixed flower beds include growing the flowers close together, disturbing the soil as little as possible, and weeding frequently all the way to the weed roots to catch every weed before it goes to seed again.
Does baking soda kill weeds?
It does when mixed with water and spread onto weed leaves, but doing so requires frequent and careful application. It’s more time-efficient to use other methods.
What is the best plant to stop weeds?
Cover crops are the best type of plant to stop weeds. These include buckwheat, clover, winter wheat, rye, oats, and alfalfa.
How do you smother weeds for garden beds?
The best way to smother weeds in garden beds is to spread a mulch or black plastic tarp over the garden to prevent the weeds from getting light.
What kills weeds naturally?
Mulches and regular weeding are both great natural ways to kill weeds.
Happy Gardening!
With these tips, you should now have a variety of preventative methods and ideas for getting rid of a number of weeds in your vegetable or flower garden, raised bed, and other garden spaces.
Want to learn more about the types of weeds in your garden? Here’s an identification guide for the most common weeds in the northeast.
