"Weed" is a Four Letter Word!

Lets get the bad news out of the way first: If you have a garden, you are going to have weeds. You've seen those "Never Weed Again" claims?? Don't believe them!

Now for the good news: There are lots of ways to minimize weeding in your vegetable garden, leaving you way more time to sit back and watch those tomatoes grow and ripen!

Crowd them out! This is one of the reasons we do so much wide row planting in the vegetable garden. Those thickly planted wide rows just out-compete the weeds! And fewer paths leave fewer places for weeds to grow, as well!

Smother them! We're big advocates of mulching and Planters Paper is our favorite vegetable garden mulch. Planters Paper is made from corn and, unlike black plastic, will break down over the course of the summer and can be tilled or dug back into the garden. No nasty plastic to deal with in the fall! We cover it with mulch hay to hold it down, but you can use any organic mulch - or just hold it in place with stakes or even rocks!

Weed early and often! It is much, Much, MUCH easier to remove tiny weeds than giant ones. We run through our extensive gardens once a week, using a shuffle hoe (our favorite weeding tool), and can do them all in about four hours. Let those weeds get big and strong, however, and it's a different story altogether!

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