The weather in the Boston area (as well as most of the Northeast) has been unbelievable mild this winter. It is still technically winter today and I am sitting here typing this in a sleeveless tank top with all the windows open. Insane. According to my Mac weather widget, it’s going to be 80 degrees on Thursday. I’m not complaining a bit, but it is a bit bizarre.
With all this nice weather lately, I have spent some time gardening while baby boy naps. When we moved to our new house last fall, we inherited three large raised garden beds in our backyard. I was thrilled as one of our criteria in looking for a house was space in the yard to have a garden. The only problem is that these raised beds had not been touched in years and were seriously overgrown with weeds and vines. We were so busy with unpacking and planning baby T’s first birthday party, that we did not get a chance to tackle the raised beds last autumn.
That leads us to this spring where we have started to deal with some serious overgrowth. The one thing that we have noticed about this area is that there are some serious vines everywhere. These vines pretty much laugh at you when you try to pull them out of the ground. They also have thorns everywhere which makes the removal process that much trickier. To give you an idea, here’s what one of the boxes looked like:
Here is what all three raised beds look like together:
I’ve basically just been pulling a rake through and then throwing out the dried out weeds one plant at a time. Some of the roots are really entrenched and are hard to pull out. I got as much pulled out as possible and then covered each box with dampened newspapers. I then laid out black pieces of cloth over the newspapers and staked them so they would remain secured down.
I’m not sure if it will help do anything, but I’ve read this can help kill any remaining weeds in the soil. In a few weeks, I am going to take off the cover, do some more weeding/root removal, and lay down some more compost before I start planting.
If you have a garden, what kind of spring prep work do you do?
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To answer your question, when you weed you really have to remove the root so using a hoe if you don’t want to do it by hand is what I’ve found to be effective. If you have lots of weeds like that there are bound to be weed seeds in the dirt. What you’re doing is good (solarizing) but it’s not a instant fix. If these are beds that you want to use this season I would take out about half of it and put in some fresh compost/dirt mix. I’m sure it needs to be refreshed anyway if it hasn’t been used.
I don’t have a deer problem so I can’t answer your question on that. I would google it and see what people do. A Fence is a good idea but I’m sure it has to be a good size. I think they can jump a little one!
Thanks for the tips Manuela! I tried to remove as many weeds by the root as possible, but I am sure I stirred up a lot of the weed seeds when I did it. I’m going to try re-weeding in a few weeks and adding in the comport/dirt mix. I’ll keep checking your blog for more gardening posts!
-m