Tips for Weeding Your Perennials

To keep your garden perennials looking their best, you need to control weeds. Weeds rob the soil of nutrients that your flowers could be using. Controlling weeds in your flower beds isn’t difficult. Like flowers, weeds come in two main groups — annuals and perennials:

The annuals form staggering quantities of seed; some produce up to 500,000 per plant. Pull annuals out of your garden before they form seed.

Perennial weeds are harder to control. They seem to live forever and expand by sending out roots or running stems for several feet in every direction. These weeds want to conquer the world. Pulling and digging at them appears to make them mad; they seem to spread even faster in response. Perennial weeds also form seeds, so don’t ever let them get to this stage. Unfortunately, mulch doesn’t stop their roots or runners. The most effective way to dispatch perennial weeds is with an herbicide.

When perennial weeds pop up in an established flower border, getting the herbicide on the weed but not the flowers is a challenge. Use a plastic bag to isolate the weed. Here’s how:

1. Cut a hole large enough to fit the weed through in the bottom of a plastic bag.

2. Pull the entire weed through the hole in the bottom of the bag.

3. Place a stone in the bottom of the bag to hold it in place.

4. Carefully spray herbicide into the top of the bag.

If you accidentally spray or spill some herbicide on adjoining flowers, immediately rinse them off with water.

5. Seal the top of the bag with a twist-tie and leave the bag in place until the weed is dead.

If your soil is loose and crumbly, a light tug is probably all you need to yank out the most stubborn weed. But in dense soil, what usually happens is that you tug at the weed and the top comes off neatly in your hand. The roots happily grow a new top, and the next time you look, the weed is back, looking refreshed and smug! To kill most weeds, you must get the root. Here’s the simplest technique to do so:

1. Slip the blade of your hand trowel into the ground straight down, next to the main root of the weed.

2. Push the trowel blade firmly against the root to loosen it.

3. Grab hold of the base of the leaves and pull.

Most of the time, this action gets you the whole weed — roots and all.

How to Choose Plants for Your First Vegetable Garden

Growing a vegetable garden is one of the most rewarding activities you can do for your family. Home grown vegetables taste better and have more nutrients than store bought veggies since you can pick them the same day you want to use them or even can them when they are at their ripest.

There are an infinite number of veggies that you can grow in your backyard or even just on your patio or balcony. Here are a few perfect plants to grow in your first veggie garden:

Green beans are an easy plant to grow in your first vegetable garden. The only hard part is knowing if the plants or seeds you have are a bush variety or are climbers. If they are bush beans, then you don’t need to do anything other than plant them a half an inch under the soil and water in well. If they are climbers, you will need to add a trellis or plant them up against a wall so that they can climb up. Green beans start to produce on average 45 days after you plant them.

Cucumbers or zucchini are also very easy vegetables to grow. When planting the seed, make sure it is buried at least 3x the diameter of the seed. Since these tend to be large seeds, make a hole half an inch down and cover it up. In a week the plant will be about an inch high already! If transplanting, make the hole the size of the root ball and gently tease out the roots and place it in the hole then water it in well. These plants can get quite large so plant 12 inches apart. It should start to set out fruit after 30 days and you can be eating cucumbers and zucchini in as little as 60 days.

Tomatoes are another plant that are not too difficult to grow. There are so many varieties to choose from and selecting what you want to grow might be the hardest part! The key to tomatoes is to remember they will not set fruit if the daytime temperatures get over 90 degrees. If you are in the Southwest, plant tomatoes in February and after Mother’s Day in most areas of the Midwest and Northern states. Make sure that the tomatoes are not on the ground as too many insects and critters will eat them before you do! You can harvest the tomatoes when they are still green or you cut some of the vine with it and allow them to continue to ripen on the vine in your kitchen.   (technically tomatoes are fruit but in cooking they are usually used as a savory ingredient so we included them as a veggie for the purposes of this post.)

Both spinach and leaf lettuce are also quite easy to grow for the beginning gardener. You can mix the seed and spread the mixture over an area and cut the baby leaves after they are a couple inches tall. This successive sowing will keep new leaves growing each week and allows you to have fresh greens until the weather gets too warm!

These are just a few of the perfect plants to grow in your first veggie garden. There are many more just waiting for you to try and see if you have a green thumb too!