Off the Fairway

Most people find the most tedious task of garden and landscape maintenance is weeding. I personally don’t mind it; it’s fairly easy and when it’s completed there’s an instant improvement to the aesthetic appearance of an area.

When weeding your gardens be sure to look within and around the base of your desirables for weeds that have hidden themselves in the crowns or under the canopy. They will often blend in and go through life unnoticed all the while spreading and throwing seeds until one

1) If left too long weeds will go to seed and drop potentially thousands of seeds in the garden making it extremely challenging to stay on top of. So never let the weeds in your garden go to seed. Some times this can happen in what seems a blink of an eye. Monitoring, planning and prioritizing when and where you put your weed management resources are very important. 2) Some weeds are more aggressive or invasive than others. You want to get these out before they start to establish a colony. Horsetail, Clover, Japanese Knotweed are a couple examples. Any plants that spread through stolons or rhizomes need to be dealt with as soon as they are spotted. If left they become very difficult to control. 3) Weeds use nutrients, water and light that you want left for the desirables in your garden.

1) Use soils from a known source. Meaning start your gardens with soils that you know have been sterilized through processing. Use professionally processed garden soils high in organic matter. When amending existing beds be sure to use these types of soils as well. 2) Mulch your beds. Cover your beds in a minimum of 3” depth of mulch. This will prevent any weed seeds in the soils from germinating. 3) Grow healthy, full plants that will take up space and out compete weeds and shade the soil. Minimize open spaces or bare soil spaces. 4) Have a hard deep cut edge in beds that are against turf areas. This will slow the spread of the turf into the bed. day they are noticed and the plant they have infiltrated becomes taken over and has to be removed in order to deal with the weeds. I often see this in ornamental grasses, Day lilies and Iris’s. The culprits are usually grass species that blend in to the foliage and are impossible to remove from the crown of the plant once they get established. Interestingly, there is mimicry in the plant world. One version of mimicry, for the sake of this topic, is called cryptic mimicry. This is where one plant avoids predator detection by resembling its host through visual or textural changes. We being the predator wanting to remove the weed and the weed snuggling up to something it resembles be it through colour, texture, or leaf shape hoping to go unnoticed.

Some tips to make the actual task of weeding easier and more successful are to weed when the soil is moist. Hard, dry soils make it tough to pull the entire plant and they often break leaving behind enough of the weed to survive and regrow. Using tools like hoes or cultivators to dig in around the weed to loosen the soil help with full removal of the plant. Thirdly, having a good soil structure high in organic matter will remove the chance of compaction or tightening making for soft soils with lots of pore space allowing for easy weed removal.

Happy weeding! ■

Chris Cumming CLP, Horticulturist Cell: 705-644-3994 chriscumming@live.ca