Effective weeding

For several decades now, we have been reconsidering their place in a vegetable garden and they have become undesirable. Some horticulturists prefer to speak of spontaneous plants as opposed to cultivated plants that they have sown or planted. Others finally give them the name of undesirable spontaneous herbs.

There is nothing semantic about these designations. They make it possible to define the place that we will leave for these herbs in the edible garden. The more they are considered bad, the more we will try to get rid of them, the more we will consider them to be spontaneous, the more we will tolerate them. The strategies for managing them will therefore be different.

Certain weeds are host plants for insect pests which come to mate or lay eggs there. It is then important to eliminate them.

Common strategies

To control the suppression of weeds/undesirable/spontaneous weeds, this is the operation which has such a bad press that we call weeding, early intervention is essential. It is when the plants have reached between 2 and 4 true leaves that elimination is easiest. Proceeding on a sunny day, once the stems have been cut from the roots, the seedlings can be left on the ground where they will dry out quickly. Those who view weeds as undesirables will make sure to destroy them all, while for weed advocates less thorough work will not pose a problem.

Effective weeding must also be planned in advance. In vegetable gardens, and especially in those which are bio-intensive, it is necessary to plan the distance between the rows and the distance on the rows. Not all tools have the same width and the one you use should determine the minimum width between the plants.

Good planning of the vegetable garden allows you to anticipate weeding operations and make it less arduous.

Whatever the strategy chosen, during weeding operations, we must ensure not to damage the roots. Sometimes, manual weeding as close as possible to the plant is more appropriate than risking damaging the roots with a tool, especially at the start of the season.

A question of size

Effective weeding of the edible garden must take into account its size. The larger the space, the more tools and canvases we will use, the smaller the land, the less we need them and sometimes just removing weeds/unwanted/spontaneous weeds by hand is enough.

Mulch and mulching  

One of the effective ways to reduce the presence of weeds is to imitate nature by adding mulch to the soil. The ecouinfo Mulch, mulching and other techniques presents the different mulching techniques and materials.

The hoe, the tool par excellence

If there are many tools to carry out weeding, at Jardins de l'écoumène, we have chosen to offer you those which seem to us to be the best on the market: the oscillating blade hoe by Growers & Co.

It is in fact a hoe made of a blade whose 2 edges are sharp. To make it more functional, its thin oscillating blade allows you to remove weeds in a back-and-forth movement where each gesture is effective. This tool was developed by the team of Jean-Martin Fortier, the famous market gardener. The tool has a long handle to make work easier.

There are three types of hoe with oscillating blade:

• 3 ¼ in : it is used when weeds/undesirable/spontaneous weeds are at the seedling stage and have a poorly developed root system
• 5 after : particularly suitable for weeding in the row when the plants are at the young seedling stage   
• 7 in: well suited for large vegetable gardens, whatever the growth stage of weeds/unwanted/spontaneous weeds

Before starting to weed a cultivated plot, it is advisable to practice on land without cultivation in order to master the use of the oscillating blade hoe and thus avoid breaking the plants.

For large vegetable gardens

When you have a large vegetable garden, it is not always easy to keep up to date with weeding. Although its use is sometimes controversial, we often have no choice in using plastic mulch. Fortunately, the black plastic mulch Bio Plus does more than control weeds. By warming the soil, it facilitates rapid root growth, resulting in more vigorous plants. In addition, it protects against erosion caused by rain. Once installed on the ground, simply make holes large enough to allow the young plants to be planted.

And for the aisles

In a vegetable garden, the maintenance of paths is frequently seen as a major problem. As there is no cultivation, we can use canvases which prevent weeds from growing. THE anti-vegetative ground cover in geotextile hinders perennial grasses already present in the soil, but it also prevents the seeds of annual weeds from germinating and taking root.

As to woven polypropylene ground geotextile, although it is not very aesthetic, it is very effective. It is this geotextile that professionals use to control weeds in greenhouses, nurseries and garden centers.

For weeding to remain effective and not become a chore, planning, organization and prevention are required.