Toward Weed Free Gardening
This is one of the most exciting documents I have written because it describes a way to garden virtually weed free . . . and yet in a completely organic way.
In order to simplify my idea, let’s break down our soil into two segments. The first segment will be the small amount of soil that we use to actually germinate our seeds.
The second segment of soil is all of the rest of it that we use to grow out our plants.
Now before I begin, let me point out how important it is that our growing soil does contain micro-organisms. These organisms include worms, beneficial bacteria, beneficial fungi, as well as the eggs and larva of beneficial insects. It is much like the beneficial yeasts and bacteria that live in our digestive tract and that we can’t live without.
In our first segment, the soil where we will germinate our seeds, we are going to sterilize our soil and kill everything in it. This is similar to how when a baby is first born and has not yet had a chance to build up these beneficial organisms in their digestive system. Having this segment of your soil sterilized, helps to protect your seeds and seedlings in their first earliest days. The most effective method of sterilizing a small portion of your soil is through solar heat. This is where you utilize the rays of the sun to heat your soil until all micro-organisms have been killed. The simplest way to do this is to build a small solar oven. By covering your soil with plexi-glass and using mirrored surfaces to reflect additional sunlight down on your soil, surprising temperatures can be achieved.
With a portion of our soil removed(or sectioned off) and sterilized (enough to create small germination rows), the remainder of our soil will be “treated” with a pre-emergent weed control. The best product on the market today for this purpose is corn gluten which is an all organic by product of the corn milling process that helps prevent seeds from germinating successfully. This product will not kill any existing weeds, but when used properly it is found to be very effective at preventing new weeds from sprouting and growing. Incidently, corn gluten is an 9-0-0 organic nitrogen fertilizer.
Now here is one suggested way that we can put the two together. We would lay out our garden area and determine what small portion of our soil will be sterilized and used for germinating seeds. The remainder of our space (soil) will be treated thoroughly to prevent weeds from germinating. In the larger growing area, we can plant starts (tomatoes, peppers, cabbage) as you always would. When we want to plant something from seed, we can either start it in our sterilized soil and then transplant it, or we can draw a narrow furrow in our large (treated) growing area, lay down a strip of newspaper that has been folded into a narrow “V” shape. Fill this small “trough” with sterilized soil and let our seeds germinate freely here. As they begin to grow and establish roots, they will push right through the newspaper and begin growing in the treated soil. We can then mulch with compost that has been “treated” with corn gluten, and enjoy something very close to a weed free garden.
Also see my page on Corn Gluten.
