Homeowner Forum / Lawn and Garden / July 2008

On average, 1 or 2 minutes per week. In the county I live in, I can
get free mulch by the truck load that has already been through the
heat cycle, therefore no live seeds.  Every year I add a couple of
inches after planting. Very few weeds make it through the mulch, a
crab grass sprout here and there is about it.

Tom J

Why in god's little green earth would you want to pull up dandelion and
rye? Dandelion has been much discussed here as it is a salad and
medicinal plant, and it also has an incredible taproot that transports
nutrient minerals to the surface to improve the soil.

Rye on the other hand creates an extremely large amount of biomass in
the soil which improves water retention and generally keeps the critters
happy.

Oh, are we talking lawn here?

Pour a slab and paint it green.

In my vegetable garden, I probably spend ten minute a week, if that
much, pulling weeds.

I have far too many weeds which give fodder to something living back
in the garden, so I'd say I weed about never!  Well, in the spring I
promise I'll keep the garden in front weeded, but the bermuda always
wins.  This is no help to you, but I just have a huge area where I
allow weeds to go.  When I bought the house I planted a lot of small
trees and this year they are finally giving me shade in most of the
backyard.  I'll take more photos and post them to my website blog
thing.

Are you talking golf course or pasture?

What defines a weed in a field?!?!?  I've never spent even one second
pulling weeds in my fields... there are probably a few hundred
different plants... if they don't duck they get mowed.

I almost never 'pull' weeds. I'll spend a few minutes with a hoe, or a
claw, or a metal-tined rake. I'm a little philosophical about it,
mainly since my knees aren't what they used to be (if they ever were!)
and I refuse to spray herbicide or pesticide anywhere on my property.
But in my three little vegetable beds, I try to eliminate any
competition (and they don't really leave- they go straight to the
composters).

Chris

First of all, I never walk through my garden without pulling at least 1
or two weeks.

On days when I set aside time to work in my garden, I usually pick an
area that has not been weeded recently and clear it entirely of weeds.
By "weeds", I mean any plant that is not something I planted (except of
course for volunteers -- interesting weeds).  I spend about 1-2 hours a
week weeding.

I actually pull some weeds; these are generally seedling ash trees (the
most common weed in my garden), wild grasses, goatsbeard, and pimpernel.
I use a paring knife to cut the roots of some weeds; these may be
spotted spurge and oxalis.  I kneel on the padded underside of an
upside-down bench.  Using a hoe, long-handled cultivator, or chemicals
is not really possible because many of my desirable plants are too close
together.  Several of my beds have ground covers (cinquefoil or
persicaria).  Today, they would be damaged by weeding methods that don't
involve close-hand work; eventually, they should grow thick enough to
limit weeds.

Contrary to some of the other replies, weeding is very important.  The
pimpernel was crowding out my candytuft and primroses in back and the
persicaria in front.  If I want those plants, I must eliminate their
competitors.  Also, with water rationing likely in the near future where
I live, I need to reduce the loss of water from the soil caused by
growing weeds.

My Hill (always written with upper-case "M" and "H", see
<http://www.rossde.com/garden/garden_back.html#hill>) is another issue.
I water it heavily but only once every two weeks.  I cannot pull weeds
on My Hill except within the first 3-4 days after watering.  Also, I can
only weed a small portion at a time; My Hill is just too steep for me to
do a thorough job all at once.  While the weeds I remove from the flat
areas of my garden go in a green bin for the county's composting
program, the weeds I pull from My Hill I lay down as a mulch.
Currently, there are many tall annual grasses, some wild mustard, and
goatsbeard.  Next year, I expect far fewer weeds on My Hill, a result of
the combination of (1) infrequent watering, (2) the mulch of old weeds,
and (3) the growth of ground cover (African daisies and English ivy)
that was planted just this past winter.

Keep weeds down by using mulch.  There are still some weeds, but the
mulch can greatly help with water conservation.  The best way to rid
the rye grass is pull it out, blade by blade, after a good soaking
rain.   I probably spend 30 minutes a week pulling weeds, a bit more
time now than other times of the year.

Eigenvector said:

Recently it seems like 7-10 hours per week, to keep the garden beds from
turning into a mass of maple, elm, ailanthus, mulberry and buckthorn.  These
are all seeds that kite in (or are pooped in, for the last two), hit the top of
any mulch, and are quite happily sprout there.  We had a drought last year
which stressed the trees into growing and enormous crop of seeds and the
bountiful rains this year meant the seeds have almost all sprouted.

If it were just the random weeds of cultivation (crabgrass, spurge, purslane,
lamb's quarters, henbit, pigweed), it woud be less time, and mulch keeps a lot
of them down.  

The pernicioius perennial weed gil-over-the-ground I rip out of the raspberries
each spring, and maybe pull from the edges sometimes while berry picking,
but I leave in the lawn.

Dandelions I pop out of the lawn where they show up.  (They almost never
sprout in any of my garden beds.)  They have gradually been beaten back
to only the way in the back part of the lawn.

Hand pulling and mulch (garden beds).  Weed popper or ignore(lawn).  
Weapons of mass destruction (carefully confined) along one fence line.

Grow the rosemary in pots...with clean potting mix. 8^)

On 7/5/2008 10:55 AM, Eigenvector wrote [in part]:

I almost missed this.

There are herbicides that are specific to grasses.  That is, they kill
grasses but not non-grasses.  As always, read the label warnings
carefully.  Some of these herbicides might cause temporary or even
permanent damage to plants you want to keep.

For the side question, I dug up a gaura in order to free it from
unpullable grass, almost killed the little shrub, but it eventually
returned, and so did the grass well rooted in the gaura's roots. So now I
just pull what I can hoping to tire out the grass before it tires me out.

I probably do weed for an hour a week but it's pretty much arranged to not
have to weed at all. All shrub clippings get mulched up and returned to
the yard, in autumn leaves are repositioned where I don't want weeds to
pop up in spring, and a Toyota pick-up truck load of clean compost costs
very little except the labor of shoveling it all over the place. Some
areas are so densely planted the weeds don't have a chance, like under the
mixed hedge which is too dark for much of anything to grow though poppies
do well at the shade-line so long as it's no nuisance that they lean over
in the only direction for sun.

Areas unplanted are permitted to be as weedy as they like, and if I spread
a garden into a weedy area, I lay down heavy cardboard and put steer
manure on that and then plant it the following spring. If it's possible to
make a hill, a new area I cover with a foot or two feet deep with
half-finished mulch and tree branches, add some dirt, then the cardboard
(and for loamy looks, inert composted steer manure) on top of that and
then add a foot or so of good garden soil on top the next spring for a
gardenable mound.  All orchestrated to keep from weeding, yet a couple
significan perennial gardens encircling the patio I just weed.

-paghat the ratgirl