Weeding Your Herb Garden
It was mentioned in one of our other articles that weeds are one of your herb plants' worst enemy. They compete with your plants for sunlight, water and soil nutrients. Plus, they're pretty good at getting what they want, and getting it all, leaving your plants with less to work with, and struggling to survive.
Weeds are hard to kill and that's what makes them even more annoying. You shouldn't even add weeds or weed roots to your compost in case they are still able to survive through it, and affect your plants when you apply compost. This scenario is actually rare, but it does happen, and because of it, weeds are not recommended for compost creation.
The problem with weeds is that they are very good at reproduction. Like plants, they mature and produce seeds which drop onto the soil and will turn into more weeds. Because of this characteristic, the best thing you can do to save your garden is to kill the weeds before they are mature enough to produce seeds. This means killing or uprooting them when they first appear and are very young. Killing them at this stage is an effective way of making sure you will have less of a problem in the future because you gave the weed no chance to reproduce.
Like your herb plants, weeds can be annuals or perennials. Annuals produce seeds, drop their seeds and let the seeds sit throughout the winter. The original weed plant dies, but the seeds grow come spring. In other cases, the dropped weeds begin growing slowly throughout the winter and come back with their full force in spring.
Try killing annual weeds while they are young. Pull them up from the soil, making sure their roots come with them. You can also use a hoe to address the weed problem. Sometimes weeds grow very near your plant, and this can mean that their roots are near your plant's roots too. Pulling them up from the roots can disrupt your plant's roots. In which case, cut the weed stalk as close to the soil as you can get. If you want, you can dig around it a little to see how far you can get before cutting it.
Perennial weeds are a type of weed that grow in your garden, die during the winter and grow back again from their roots when spring arrives. Like perennial plants, they will reproduce and drop their seeds towards the end of their life cycle. These are the types of weeds that we really don't want to put in our compost. They are notorious for having deep and strong root systems that spread wide throughout a plant bed.
The best way to kill perennial weeds is to uproot them before you transplant or sow any of your herbs. You can dig up your herb garden and start uprooting the weeds. You have to make sure you get all the roots, and everything they are connected to. This doesn't assure you that you will be rid of them throughout your planting season, though. Missing even just one or a few can make them come back.
If they do come back, you will have to attend to them as best you can during the growing season. You can try uprooting them without disturbing your plant's roots or apply an organic weed killer that will not affect your plant's growth. At the end of the season, dig up your soil again, and uproot what you can find. Then apply a weed killer to your soil.
Page Two: Other Ways to Eliminate Weeds From Your Herb Garden (Weeding Your Herb Garden continued)
