Getting Rid of Weeds

Gardening has many wonderful benefits: it can be very relaxing, fun, and you have a beautiful area to look at, or a nice place to grow fruits and vegetables. Gardening, however, is a lot of work. You are basically trying to get the earth what you want to do, rather than what it wants to do naturally. Taming nature is always difficult, especially because of weeds. A weed is really just any plant that you do not want to grow there, but typically they are fast growing and ugly. Getting rid of weeds is never easy, but here are a few things that you can try.

The first thing that you need to decide is if you want something to grow where the weeds are growing. If you do not want anything to grow there, the weeds are much easier to handle. Commercial herbicides such as RoundUp will certainly do the trick. Commercial organic herbicides will also work, but they usually are not quite as effective at keeping the weeds down.

Many organic herbicides are made out of vinegar, so you can try making your own by mixing vinegar in with dish soap. If you do not plan on growing anything in that area for a long time, use rock salt and spread it over the area. You can also mix salt in with water and dish soap to get the same effect, but a little easier time applying it. Once again, this will kill all plants in the area and leave it infertile for many years, so do not do it if you are planning to grow anything in that area.

If you want to grow things in the area with weeds, your task is much harder. If you are growing fruits and vegetables, your main option will probably be to remove the weeds by hand. This is certainly a lot of work, but you do not want to contaminate something that you are going to eat later.

If you have a flower garden, one popular solution is to lay newspapers around your flowers. Cover the newspapers with mulch to keep the area looking good. The weeds will not receive the sunlight they need to grow, but water will still soak through to your flowers. You probably will want to soak the newspapers before you lay them down to keep them from flying away. An alternative to this is to use a black plastic tarp and lay it down over the area, but poke holes for you plants to grow. The heat from the sun on the tarp should kill any weeds.