Family Gardening! Tips and Tactics To Battle The Weeds!

           

  It is July and we have squash coming out of our ears! After spending our summers driving to Windsor's cheese facility for the past two years, this year we had a garden. And not just any garden! Oh no, it is the biggest garden we have had in 10 years! Go big or bust right? It has been a challenge to keep up with it while we were working on our home facility, but Karson has the farming bug, especially if it involves some kind of engine.....tractor, tiller....He wanted to try some larger scale growing to share produce this year with the hopes that he can sell a little next year.
              So with about 60 hills of watermelon, 10 hills of butternut, 50 hills of cantaloupe, 50 lbs of potatoes, 65 tomato plants, and a lot of corn, keeping the weeds back has been a battle. But I thought I would share the various techniques we use to keep the fight to a minimum.

             Planting Closer Together

     

        Ok! So this cantaloupe was not intentionally planted QUITE so close together! But this type of planting, while reducing yield, somewhat, will canopy over the ground faster and choke out weeds quicker than conventional spacing. These were planted about 4 feet apart and another foot would have been better. These are also on plastic that had extra holes in it. The plastic helps, but I still had to weed in those extra holes, once. Now the cantaloupe is spilling off the plastic and almost climbing one another. But we are seeing melons so looking forward to harvest!

             Mulch of Hay or Paper

     During the spring and summer, we save paper and cardboard of all kinds. Cereal boxes, junk mail, magazines, cardboard boxes, and old school papers all go to the garden.

 We lay them on the ground and then cover them with grass clippings or old hay to keep the weeds at bay. It is especially effective at weeds that have already started. We just clip or weedwack the weeds to the ground and cover them well.

 Our favorite crops to use this method on would be melons and squashes. That is because there is a lot of space between hills and we don't have to work around a lot of plants. We just need to cover a lot of weedy ground.

When we plant our potatoes we lay our cuttings on the bare ground, making sure the cutting has good ground contact. Then we cover with a thick much of hay. Maybe a tad less thick where the actual cutting is with heavier cover where it is not. We have never had to weed the potatoes. Sometimes we don't harvest when we should and then we have to remove weeds to get to the potatoes after the plants have died back, though. 

       Harvesting mulched potatoes is easy! Simply pull the hay back and there are the potatoes with minimal digging!

            Plastic

       We use old silage plastic from local dairy farms. Farmers grow, chop, and then store the whole plant in a dirt pit or concrete pit. It ferments and is used for feed for cows. But they seal/cover it with a thick plastic that they slowly take off as they feed. This means heavy, reusable plastic that is great for planting plants in. 

      We have used this plastic for two seasons and will simply roll it up and use it again after the plants are done. We hold it down on the ground with rocks, dirt, chunks of wood, or metal stakes. It just depends on what we have on hand. This is my favorite gardening method as the only part that needs weeding is in the holes where you have planted the seeds! You can see a clod of Johnson grass I missed! 

          Tiller and Hoe   

       There won't be any pictures in this section! (Chuckle) That would involve a bunch of hot and grumpy faces as this method is not popular with me or the children! We use this method on large patches of corn. We plant and then till when the weeds come in. The hoeing part comes in when we pull weeds from between the individual corn stalks. It only takes about a month for the corn to canopy and shade out oncoming weeds.
       How do you weed your sweet corn? How do you keep the coons out? Karson will be in charge of that job! I will update as the season progresses!