One of the most tasking duties of a gardener is not planting, but weeding. It is a known fact that weeds grows at a remarkable speed and most times tends to quickly overtake a garden. Most gardeners choose the use of poisons and herbicides because the manufacturers guarantee that their products will break down in the soil very quickly.
My experience when I used an herbicide product called Roundup to stop weeds and create a weed free garden, was not the best in the world. The grasses in my garden stopped growing for the next six months just after the application of a second dose of the herbicide. I definitely wouldn’t recommended using herbicides for anyone, because my experience has proven that it might kill your plants.
I was once faced with the enormous responsibility of removing the weeds from my garden. I had just packed into a new rental property where I had a large front garden with nice concrete kerbs creating a border for the beautiful garden. I initially started to weed and soon got tired of weeding and made the greatest mistake to stop weeding. I had left the garden for about a month and there were more weeds than ever.
I had to make the garden weed free and mulching was too expensive for me to afford, as I was all on my own. My landlord wasn’t ready to support me in offsetting the bill as much as I wasn’t ready to cater for the cost of gardening supplies and plants especially when it wasn’t my own property. A cheap landscaping option was what I desperately needed.
So I decided to use a cheap mulching option, that wouldn’t cost too much but still work effectively to make the garden look good with no more weeds. I chose three basic supplies;
1. Newspaper -it’s free and it doesn’t take long to build up a stock pile of papers,
2. Sugar cane mulch –it’s cheap and comes in big bags and finally,
3. A few bags of bark – although not so cheap, but little quantity is required and it’s used to give color.
How to Use the Supplies for a Weed Free Garden
STEP 1:
First prepare the garden, by weeding the whole garden by hand. Then rake over the soil until a nice and smooth texture is noticed and then apply the newspaper. The thicker the newspapers the better the results. Next thing to do is to spread the newspapers out and then wet it all down with the aid of a hose connected to a water source. When it is soaked, the heavy paper won’t be blow away in the wind and will mold better to the surface of the ground
STEP 2:
What next? Sspread out the sugar cane mulch. Use straw if the cheap sugar cane mulch isn’t available, but ensure to remove all seed particles in it. Make sure all the paper is covered well enough. Apply water to damp down the mulch and discover a lovely golden colour.
STEP 3:
The next step is to apply the bark. Grab a hand full and throw it around. You don’t need to cover the yellow mulch totally, the barks mainly give color and to contrast to the mulch. This is a very effective mulch method. The result after some months usually is a few weeds growing on the garden especially Nutgrass which can be pulled out by hand and gave up eventually after a year. Harsh sun tends to fade the beautiful browns and golden colour, but before then, you should have plenty of flower to beautify the garden.
The best part of mulching using cheap mulching options to remove weeds is the beauty it brings and a garden with no weeds.
Source: Gardens That Win [link]
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