Plant Gardens 101

Weeds are a gardener’s nightmare and can really spoil your enjoyment of you garden. A gardener’s dream is to have a lush, green lawn and neat, colourful borders all free from weeds. It is said that prevention is better than cure, and this is certainly true for weeds. Let weeds take hold in your garden and you will always be fighting them, and it will always be a struggle. Weeding out established weeds can be a backbreaking task, prevention is definitely the key.

Follow the following tips to help prevent weeds invading and taking hold in your garden.

1. Tackle weeds or grass sprouting up between paving slabs immediately – Either use a good weedkiller to kill them or use an old knife to prise them out. Don’t let them spread. Re-point any gaps with cement to stop them growing through again. (more…)

A weed is not a specific type of plant, it is simply an unwanted plant or a plant that is growing where it is not wanted. Once upon a time, this weed was a wanted plant and may have been introduced to the locality for a particular use – to look pretty, to be used in cooking or for culinary purposes. However, the plant has now become undesirable and has been labelled a “weed”.

Due to the fact that they are native plants and are ideally adapted to their local environment, weeds can take over an area of land or a garden very quickly. They are unwanted because they compete with wanted garden plants for nutrients in the soil, water, light and space and can push out more fragile plants. It is important to do regular weeding in your garden, to stop the growth and spread of these undesirables, so that your other plants can grow. You do not need any high tech or expensive equipment to get rid of weeds in your garden – just buy a small garden hand fork and some gardening gloves and use a washing up bowl or bucket to collect weeds in. For bigger, established areas, you may need a proper garden fork.

Be careful when disposing of weeds, you do not want any seeds to spread or fragments to fall on the soil and regrow.

When you are thinking about ridding your garden of weeds, you need to consider what type of plant the weed is, so that you will know when and how to deal with it:- (more…)