Soooo… I let my garden grow over last year. Like real bad. The whole year. I'm now cursing myself while pulling allllll these weeds out. The thing is, the soil beneath this mess is rich, full of earthworms, and just beautiful. I'd like to take said soil and fill raised beds with it, but am worried I'll transfer residual weeds in the process. Anyone here have advice on the best way not to do that?
Photo of my assistant having a rest in the aforementioned bed of weeds.
TIA!
by unlikelystory_
6 Comments
You’re always going to be fighting weeds. Just dig out the current bed of weeds and plant for the new season.
weedwack down to ground, lay a couple layers of cardboard on your rows asap and when youre ready to plant just cut the cardboard out in an smallish X you can sort of peel back to transplant your individual plants. I did this for some hungarian hot wax peppers on untilled lawn without any sort of soil prep whatsoever and they turned out to be my best producing peppers.
You can use a soil sifter to get out most of the bits of root, but that won’t help with seeds. However it’ll be pretty easy to remove the weeds as they sprout in the raised beds since the soil will be loose and the beds easy to access.
I would mow and compost the grass then till it and grow in the ground. Cut weeds with a hoe. Pulling them lifts seeds up where they can germinate. Give your plants lots of space as the first year will be weedy.
I wouldn’t move the soil to a raised bed. That will just be weed city, and you’ll have a hole to fill. You’ll also kill a lot of the fungal biome by digging it up. You’d be better off using the cardboard trick to reset this bed, and then fill your raised beds with new bagged soil (or similar).
I would suggest to mow and either till or if you have time you can put cardboard or black plastic tarp on top for a few weeks/months to kill the weeds. You won’t ever get rid of weed even if you move your soil into raised beds. There are thousands of seeds in the ground that are waiting for the right conditions to germinate and I’m not counting the ones that fly away. It’s a never ending story!