Weed control or The Best Garden Tip Ever

Control of annual weeds in a garden is easy if you obey the ten day rule. Rake the seed bed before planting, not days before planting but just before planting. Mark your calendar to cultivate the rows in ten days. Chances are you won’t see any weeds and will wonder why you should be running the hoe along between the rows. Take your hoe and drag it along just barely below the surface then look at the hoe. You should see a lot of white or light colored threads. These are weeds that have only had time to put up a slender stem and down an equally slender root. In a couple of more days the root will branch out and start to take hold of soil. Once it does that it will be more difficult to pull and when pulled either by hand or by hoe it quite likely will be able to hold onto enough soil to stay alive. The first ten day cultivation will kill 80% or more of the weeds that will be sprouting from seed.
That is the core of the ten day rule. As a vegetable farmer there have been times when that first cultivation was all that I got around to doing and yet I harvested a crop. Going back for cultivation after another ten days is certainly a good idea and getting down close and personal to complete the job by hand weeding in the row while thinning if necessary is always my goal but I want to emphasize that first ten day cultivation. I make it a higher priority than planting seeds. My first year with a market size garden I kept planting seeds because I obviously wouldn’t get a crop if I didn’t plant. At the end of the year I found there were several plantings that never reached the market because the weeds overwhelmed them. No sense planting something that won’t make it to market so now I make sure nothing I plant is lost to weeds—maybe lost to deer, or porcupines, or woodchucks (groundhogs), or mice, or crows, or turkeys but not weeds.
PS: Deer, porcupines and woodchucks are kept out of my gardens with electric fence. I got a barn cat that seems to be helping with the mice and for crows it is important that they not see me planting corn (I’m serious. Don’t leave any corn seed above ground and if crows do pull up your corn seedlings for the seed, plant deeper next year.) Turkeys did not bother me until last fall when they took a liking to lettuce and arugula. I’m covering these crops with row cover and trying to scare the turkeys with shots, shouts, and firecrackers in the hope they will take the hint that they are not welcome in the gardens. The jury is out on that one. I am reluctant to try putting up a high fence as they could fly over it.

Bindweed

My daughter and her husband bought an older home and the yard is filled with BINDWEED! How does one rid the yard of this noxious plant? Please help! We grow vegetables as well and do not want to use chemicals to kill this plant.
I look forward to your response.
Thanks,
Donna
Donna, your email box was full so I'm posting my answer here.
This is a tough one. The empathetic gardener thinks, “The plant needs energy which it gets from the sun. The only way it can get this energy is through leaves. If I can keep it from having leaves, it will eventually die.”
I have only dealt with it in gardens which is curious since I have extensive mowed areas. Bindweed must have been or still be in some of these areas since, I suppose, it was already present when I converted sod to garden. In my reference books (including Weeds of Lawn and Garden) I only find solutions for dealing with it in cultivated soil. The books say to till or cultivated repeatedly, every other week or sooner and that this may take more than one growing season. When my son was preteen I would pay him and a friend by the ounce for the "gold" roots. Perhaps I didn't pay enough or use the right motivation because, though he and his friend loved to dig, they tired of gold mining too soon. When my Tom Sawyer plan failed I found myself out there digging up the rhizomes. It was just a matter of keeping after them, getting as many as I could in the time I had and keeping an eye on the patch and going after any as they appeared above ground.
For the lawn I would probably just mow and see what happens. If it doesn't get worse, I'd forget about it and accept bindweed as part of the diversity of my organic lawn. I have a ground ivy that shares a lot of my lawn and has spread over the years but it doesn't bother me. However, if you want to get rid of bindweed without tilling up the whole lawn and keeping it that way for most of a year, I suggest going after it one stem at a time on hands and knees with a hand lawn weeding tool. This tool is about 18 inches long including the handle and has a V shaped end that you stick in the ground at an angle to cut the stem below ground surface. They will keep coming and you will have to keep after them. Pick a small patch to work on and keep after it until the bindweed is gone then move on to another patch. This will be a test of your persistence.

natural herbicide

Hi Mort,

I came across your website and I see you are an expert on organic gardening, so I'd love to get your opinion on something. Several months ago, I tried pouring very small amounts of used cooking oil into the cracks of my walkway where weeds tend to spring up. It has completely killed the weeds (they turned black and died) and kept them away for months now.

My question - is this practice safe for the environment? I'd appreciate your opinion, and if you like the idea, you are very welcome to pass it along!

Debi
Hi Debi,
I would certainly prefer your method to a Monsanto product. Seriously, I really don't see any environmental problem. There are some ants that might be attracted to the oil so that could be a problem for you but, again, not for the bigger environment. I have not heard of anyone doing this before. Vinegar is also a fairly good herbicide.

How to Lose Weight

My wife has a double chin in our wedding pictures. She had gained weight in just the four months since I had asked her to marry me. She wasn’t really fat but if I hadn’t already decided that I wanted to live with her wrinkles or fat or whatever, I would have been having some second thoughts. The first couple of years of our marriage calories were in the forefront of her thinking. Weight Watchers seemed to work best for her during this period. She would frequently give me some Weight Watchers concoction like a milk shake saying, “Taste this. It’s really good.”
“Mmmmm. Yeah, that’s tasty,” I dutifully replied but shortly afterward I would notice an unpleasant taste in my mouth. To get rid of the taste, I would eat or drink something. I pointed that out to her but I don’t think that caused the change but change did come shortly thereafter.
Barbara started thinking about food and how to make it taste good. She focused on organic and natural food and culinary delights rather than calories. The calories she ate were complex rather than empty. We define empty calories as those found in refined foods like white flour and sugar. The concept is that our bodies need a variety of nutrients. I don’t know how many different nutrients humans need but plants need at least sixteen. Our theory is that if the body is not getting something it needs, it will send out a signal asking for more food until the deficient nutrient is ingested. Since our body is not specific in its request we just keep eating. Actually we have found that we sometimes crave something that we figure our body needs, but it is safer to just provide the body with complex food regularly.
Whole wheat has got more nutrients than white flour. Likewise for honey and maple syrup versus sugar. Fruits and vegetables are loaded with what in the garden we call micro nutrients.
Barbara and I were married in 1969. Today we are in partnership with our son in a restaurant. Josh is an excellent chef using the best ingredients he can find. He is a great fan of the organic vegetables I supply. Barbara never got any fatter than she was on our wedding day. She is a trim sixty year old and I’m a fairly trim seventy in spite of eating a lot of great food at the restaurant. Many of our customers will ask how we stay so trim with all that good food. The answer may be found in another frequently heard comment. “I never eat vegetables but I ate all the vegetables on my plate.” The secret behind Josh’s vegetables? They are fresh, organic, cooked to order, and cooked perfectly. When we eat them we don’t leave any emptiness.
If you want to know more about the restaurant, http://joshuas.biz