Give Your Vegetable Garden Plants Room to Grow
Before you get your hands in the dirt and start planting your vegetable garden, you may wonder if you should weed your vegetable garden. In short, yes! You’ll need to make room for nature to do its thing. This means cleaning out garden weeds for new roots to take hold.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Preparing your garden area will help to rid pests or a fungus creating a healthy spot for your fresh vegetables to grow and plants to thrive.
When weeds are in your garden bed, they suck the out nutrients and hydration away from your vegetable plants. So whether you are growing food or flowers the last thing you want is anything leeching off of your plants. Insect nibbling at the leaves or a weed whose choking up your roots are not allowing your garden to succeed.
Making Space for Roots to Sprout and Flourish
The first bit of weeding you’ll be doing, which is the hardest, is thinning out your sprouts. You will usually need to plant more seeds than you’ll use to ensure that space has a sprout that pops up.
But leaving too many sprouts in that place allows the same thing that happens with weeds – two plants competing for the same nutrients. Once you’ve chosen the sprout to leave in place, you’ll want to continually watch for weeds to pop up around it so that you can pull it immediately.
Here are some simple ways to weed a vegetable garden:
Pull Weeds by Hand
One of the easiest and most effective ways to weed a vegetable garden is to simply pull the weeds out by hand. This is the best and quickest way if you only have a few weeds to rid. Or if you want to be very precise in what you remove. On addition to clearing weeds, pulling them by hand is a surprising way to calm your mind.
Hoeing Weeds
Using a hoe is a quick and efficient way to weed large areas of your veggie garden. Simply drag the hoe blade through the soil just below the surface, cutting off the weeds at the roots.
Mulching
Mulching is a great way to prevent weeds from growing in the first place. Cover the soil around your plants with a layer of organic mulch, such as straw, leaves, or grass clippings. This will help suppress weed growth and also help retain moisture in the soil.
Using a cultivator or tiller
If you have a larger garden, a cultivator or tiller can help you weed more quickly. These tools work by turning the soil and breaking up the weeds, making them easier to remove.
Use a weeding tool
And you can control weeds using ONLY using safe and non toxic products. With this said I personally only use pet friendly and child safe products around the areas. And not directly on my vegetable patch.
There are many different types of weeding tools available to weed your vegetable garden area. They are specifically designed to make weeding easier. Some tools, like the Hori Hori knife, have a sharp blade that you can use to cut through weeds. While others, like the CobraHead weeder, have a curved blade which is useful to dig out weeds by their roots.
Don’t Let Weeds Take Hold
If you wait and procrastinate with the task of weeding, that plant will become stronger and will be harder to remove, as well. Some people make the mistake of thinking their plant can survive it, but even if it does, having to harvest a garden with produce tangled up among weeds will be a difficult process for you.
This is not merely an aesthetic task, to keep your garden looking nice. It needs to be done routinely. Some people avoid it because they have a difficult time getting up and down in their garden.
There are stand-up weeder tools you can buy to make the task much simpler. The best thing about them is that they get to the root of the weed and remove it. If you weed your garden by hand, you have to make sure you’re taking it out down to the root or else it will simply pop right back up and continue leeching off of your garden.
Concluding Should You Weed Your Vegetable Garden
Gardening is a love for many people. Whether for flowers or growing a vegetable garden, digging in the dirt is investment in your health and the environment around you. So take the time to prepare your soils, weed your vegetable garden, and, give it the food it needs for plants, flowers and life sustaining vegetables too.
Check out all the gardening tools on Amazon today… and remember that garden tools are beautiful gifts too!