Rivenrock Gardens Cactus Blog… go to www.rivenrock.com for edible cactus

Vickie and I were going around the pond today weeding the tender shoots of springtime grass. While bending and methodically tugging the grasses out of the mulch it made me reflect on weeding. Not that this is anything that is normally given much thought, but the facts as I see it are that one can work hard at a weeding job year after year, or one can work with consistency and attention to the life cycle of the plants, noting their seeding and other reproductive characteristics and use that to your advantage to reduce total weeding chores when considering the whole scope of the garden as its’ design is carried on from year to year. My major thoughts on weeding are this:

* Not all plants are weeds. ‘Weed’ is a term we use to denote a plant that is growing where one does not want it to grow. Therefor a cactus plant in a cornfield is a weed. But a corn plant in a cactus patch may be seen as a weed to the cactus grower. I stress this to make the point that ‘weed’ is used as a derogatory term to a certain extent. Yet all plants share many characteristics that when understood may be used to enable one to come to terms with weeding.

* A beautiful manicured garden is attractive, but is much work. It may be better to tolerate a small amount of weeds in some areas that are not negatively impacted by a small amount of weed growth. I for instance have some areas where we grow our large plants, I do absolutely no weeding on many of these areas. The cactus plants and trees are able to grow above or within the rank foliage of the annual grasses and herbs. They cause no harm to the cactus plants, and indeed help to bind the soil during our rainy periods in the winter. I let them grow until they have set seed, then I come along with a hand-held string trimmer (51cc Shindaiwa) and spend several days cutting the annual grasses down to six inches or so from the ground. The cut portions of the grasses will settle onto the ground and form a light mulch that will shade the soil, and eventually rot back into the soil keeping the humus content of the soil high. These grasses are often six feet high and I cannot see many cactus when viewing the area from a distance. In fact it is fun for Vickie and I to walk into this ‘high grass’ area and be twenty feet from one another and barely able to see each other. It is also interesting to see the succession of grasses and forbs that grow in this area, there is a regular progression of different plants that grow throughout the winter. The cutting of the grasses also affords a chance for me to get the perennial plants that like to grow here, the poison oak, lupines, sagebrush and creosote etc. I do like to keep the hillside cactus garden free of these perennial plants that often will interfere with my cactus growing efforts. Some will say that the garden could be better and more easily maintained with just an herbicide application, and while this might be true in the short term, I believe this is a short-sighted approach when you consider the fact that weed plants carry a certain amount of bio-mass that will be returned to the soil in a form that the micro-flora and fauna will be able to use. The mulch of the plants when cut and left on the soil surface will perform the same function as a purchased and brought in mulch. It will shade the soil, and moderate temperatures; Hold moisture in; keep the soil open and easily permeable to water, roots and worms. It will encourage the worms to run to the surface at night, feeding on the detritus there and returning back into the lower levels when day comes. This is actually much better than the old ‘dust mulch’ or bare earth methods which became popular in the 1800′s and continue largely unabated to this day.

* There are times and places that I want absolutely no plants growing that I did not plant. Mostly this is in the vegetable garden, where I often have bare soil for a short time while young plants are breaking the surface. Most of our annual native plants are very fast growers and will out-compete the non-native vegetables. For this reason I really like to make sure that the vegetables will have generally weed free conditions in which to get off to a good start. There are two ways to do this, one is the hard way and one is the easy way. The hard way entails endlessly sitting and kneeling on the soil pulling weeds laboriously from the ground one at a time, taking care to differentiate the weeds from the vegetables, and doing this for a couple weeks off and on until the weeds are gone and the vegetables are getting large enough to out-compete the weeds. The easy way is to plan ahead a bit, don’t get into such a rush to plant today, prepare the soil much in advance of the planting, rake the soil after adding the compost and other fertilizers and digging it in. Water the soil, and let it sit for a week, then lightly rake it again. This will uproot the young weeds and many of them will die. Let them sit for a few days dying in the sun, then rake again to kill the rest you missed. Then water a couple days later, and a week after that rake the soil again. This should kill the majority of the weeds that will be germinating. Now when you plant soon after this do not till the soil again, the trick to this is to keep all buried weed seeds buried and not near the surface where they will germinate. If they were near the surface initially they germinated and were killed with the raking. So what you do now is scatter the vegetable seeds in the beds and rake them in gently to get them a bit covered up. This will get you some nice plants growing up without much competion from weeds. Of course you should still keep an eye on the beds to remove the odd weed here and there (we all know that they will come in on occasion).

* ‘One years’ seeding makes one years’ weeding’ is an old axiom that is worth repeating endlessy. Another one that I like is ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. Both of these are so very appropriate when used in the weeding context. Let me explain. A weed seed can live for years in a dormant state, in fact a seed in a sense is really a real live thing in a state of ‘suspended animation’. It has a food supply on which to draw from when the time comes to sprout. This will enable it to get a start in life until it’s own leaves can unfold and process the foods coming from the newly developing roots. The plant does not have an infinite reservoir of nutrients, it has only enough to live until it can break the soil surface. But what if it has been buried deep in the soil by an animal or tilling? In this case the seed can in many cases ‘sense’ that it is too deep, so it waits. Nature has infinite patience and can outlast any person. There are cases of archaeological digs in which ancient seeds, hundreds, even thousands of years old were found, and sprouted. I once grew a strain of black corn found at an Aztec archaeological dig in Mexico. When you let your weeds go to seed you are making a lot of work for yourself in coming years. I believe that it is imperative to get rid of all weeds before they seed themselves. So do not have more garden than you can handle, it is better to have a smaller garden that is very little work, and as the years go by you can add to it as your experience grows. This is preferable to a large garden that overwhelms you with the great demands imposed by the seasons. * Have a good deep mulch where it is possible. Vickie and I single handily take care of a lot of garden, and we try to do it with a minimum of work. We are so busy adding on to our gardens with new area that we have to reduce the work of upkeep and maintenance on the established sections.We do this with mulch piled kind of deep when I can. Near the house I do not want too much in the way of weeds or ground cover. I like the ground to be open to view, this is because I like the open ‘park-like’ effect of open ground. I also like the ground to be visible when walking near the house due to the high number of rattlesnakes near our house, we also have scorpions and other creatures which are interesting to observe but you miss them if the ground is covered with weeds or grasses. I like to use mulch piled about 4 inches thick onto the soil. When making a new garden area I like to weed-whack the ground to get rid of the deep grasses, then I pile the mulch on five or even six inches deep. Over the next few months it will settle down to a fibrous mat about four inches thick smothering much of the native plant material. Even better is a thick layer of newspapers (not the glossies) covered with a few inches of mulch. I don’t use the papers myself, but know people who have had good luck with that method. I work such large areas and have to be concerned with my organic certification, so I stick with just the mulch. I use about fifty to sixty cubic yards of mulch yearly, and that is not nearly enough to do what I want to do. You might be able to get spent tree clippings from a municipal source nearby for free. I can stop by a yard where the county dumps this stuff from the municipal tree trimming crews. It used to be that people in town could get them to drop it off at their house because no-one really wanted it. But now that there is a bit of competition for this material they decided to just dump it in a pile and let people take it home themselves. Now this mulch will by no means entirely eliminate weeding from your life. It just reduces the weed growth a quite a bit depending on the weeds and their growth habits. But it sure does make the weeding job easier. Imagine crawling over an area you have mulched the year before, here and there are weeds coming up through the mulch, you grip one and it comes out of the soft spongy mulch so easily, a lot less work is involved with each individual weed, and a lot less weeds in total.

There are two ways that weeds will be in a mulched area, there will be tough weeds that grow through it from below, these will be perennial weeds like bushes and tough forbes, but they are now isolated and singular instead of being one weed among thousands. So you can now take some effort into getting rid of them easily, maybe digging then out if necessary, slicing into the root with a spade (without digging the mulch in). The other type of weed that gets through the mulch in this area is the creeping rhizome types that spread by underground stolons. The only way to get these is to make sure you continually pull the ones you can get without digging into the soil. On occasion I will add more mulch over patches of this type that cause me such trouble. I continually try to ‘drown’ them in more mulch, building the mulch higher and higher. Hoping to eventually cause the plant to run out of energy to keep up, at some point it will die. You will also get new weeds that will come in as wind blown, or animal deposited seeds and land onto the mulch. These are where the real beauty of mulch comes into its own. These type of seeds will drop a bit into the mulch, and start their germination, they will perceive themselves to be in the ground and will send out a root to pull up nutrients, they will also stick their little heads above ground getting light. This is when you can come along when they are weeks or months into growth (but remember to get them before they flower) and you can so very easily pull these from the ground, they will have no good roots as they were just growing in the fibrous mat of the mulch. They will have a long root which has been trying to work it’s way through the mulch trying to find a nutrient source. This is one of the reasons I like mulch around the house so much, it does really make for an attractive landscape. A saying I made up goes ‘one hours mulching is worth three hours weeding’. I really feel that I save so much work by mulching that I do not begrudge the chore of stopping by the mulch yard to get a truck load when I can.

There are many schools of thought on weeding, some say that we should let nature take its course and accept the native vegetation. I do this to a degree in some areas as explained earlier, but when it comes to attractive and easy to walk on and safe I much prefer no weeds. But I must say that nature in general does not like bare ground, bare ground is generally not going to grow much. So I like to have the mulch to cover the soil and take the place of the grasses that would normally be there.