Weeds - how to mitigate them OR encourage growth of the beneficial ones

Mary and the Master Gardener’s Podcast

In this episode we discuss weeds, both mitigation, and propagation. Some weeds are a problem, but some have beneficial properties

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If you have a gardening question, please email Mary at [e-mail] or Liz at [e-mail]

00:00
Mary Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Well, that all depends, but that's not really what this podcast is about. We're here to help you grow your garden. Welcome to Mary and the Master Gardener. Today, Liz the Master Gardener is going to talk about how to keep weeds down or suppressed or gone, preferably.

00:24
Yes, as best as I can, as best as I can guide. Okay. Michelle Bellin asks, what's the best way to prevent weeds from taking over? Go ahead, Liz, tell me all the secrets. I don't know if there are any real secrets to weeds, but so here's a few methods that I use, and then there's methods that, right,

00:54
that are available to everyone. I don't use chemicals. I don't use herbicides. I don't use anything like that. I, I pull weeds. That's my method. But there's a lot of methods that you can use to get ahead of it, right? So so it's a big garden if you're doing vegetables, you know, using tilling sometimes can be

01:24
the best method at the beginning of the season. But if you're trying not to disrupt the ground too much, the number one would be mulching. So mulching using natural mulch, right? So straw, wood chips, shredded leaves, you can buy mulch at the store. It blocks sunlight, it prevents weeds from germinating and coming up.

01:53
you can also use weed barriers, right? So they make the landscape fabric that you can use. And it does a pretty good job, you know, of allowing air to come through, which plastic doesn't. So I don't recommend using plastic because it kills everything that's under it, right? It's gonna kill the worms. It's gonna kill all of this lovely ecosystem that you have going. So weed barrier is another

02:22
method and I've done that in my garden before. I go back and forth between that because it can be helpful especially if you're doing a lot on your own. But I think the number one is going to be mulching. Okay. Or staying ahead of it, right? Yes. I know it's the simplest and it's the most difficult.

02:48
because I always forget to lift with my legs and I always lift with my back and then the next morning I'm in pain and wondering what I did wrong. Yep, even though you know exactly what you did wrong, we all do it. It's so dumb, but we all do it. Right, yep, yep. Okay, so I have things to share on this too. In our newly built greenhouse, it's, I think it's 40 by...

03:16
18, 40 feet by 18 feet or 40 feet by 20 feet. We aren't necessarily gonna be growing anything in the actual dirt of the greenhouse. It's gonna be more seed starting and hanging pots and things like that. So my husband took the bags that our chicken feed comes in, cut them so they're flat, and he's laid those down in there to kill all the grasses and weeds that are still coming up because it was field. It was...

03:45
before the greenhouse was built where it is. And so we're not so concerned about screwing up the ecosystem in that soil because we don't intend to grow anything in that soil. And someone suggested to him that he use the feed bags because they're gonna cover the dirt, the sun won't be able to get to any seeds in the ground and nothing will grow anymore. So we're trying that for the greenhouse. I wouldn't try that for...

04:15
for a garden outside because it will ruin the soil. Right, yeah, that's true. So there's other methods too that are, I mean, go find some cardboard that you have laying around your house and you can put the box, unfold it, put it down, and that it allows oxygen to come through, it allows minimal sunlight, but it actually can be good bedding to create

04:45
different growth. That way you're not having to go and disrupt the soil in any way. You're just kind of creating a new layer, right? A new start. Right. The other thing that I wanted to mention is in Minnesota, I don't know if this grows everywhere, but I really noticed when we started our gardening 20 something years ago, there is a weed that grows in Minnesota called purslane.

05:13
It is a weed, but it's also really good for you. You can eat it. Yes, you can. And I've read up on it and it actually has more nutritional value than spinach does. Yes, it's very good. You can see the, the, you know, how the purslane leaves get kind of chunky. Like you can see the moisture in them and they do, they do really well. So that's kind of a natural ground cover, right? And there's.

05:44
ground covers that you can plant or plant spacing, right? Plant spacing and plant planning, right? So planting certain plants next to each other, companion planting, one might shade out the other so that one will grow on, I have chamomile all over and I have mint in a lot of the garden to kind of be that weed barrier, right? And it's edible.

06:14
So a lot of that too can be just how you, like I think about creeping Jenny, right? That beautiful little yellow plants that grows, it's a ground cover and you can put that down, that can be beautiful, keeps the weeds out. And then if it's overgrowing where you don't want it, pull it. Yep. And yarrow or yarrow, however you say it, I don't know if it's a...

06:41
if it's a narrow A or a big open A, but Y-A-R-R-O-W. Yep. That's a really good one too. And yarrow has some really good uses as well. Yes. And it grows naturally, at least in my area. It's all over. And it's really pretty. When it blooms, it's gorgeous. So there are weeds that are...

07:08
I don't want to use the word bad because no plant is bad except for maybe poison ivy. But there are weeds that are not beneficial and there are weeds that you actually do want to encourage the growth of. Yes. Yes. Some that are beneficial, right? And they're gonna keep other pests and other things. It'll protect the other plants as well. Yeah. Someone I talked to for the other podcast last week mentioned that she

07:37
grows comfrey plants under her apple trees as a way to keep the weeds down around the apples. And she said that it's excellent nutrients for the ground because as the plant dies off and compost basically rots on top of the dirt around the apple trees, it puts all this gorgeous nutrition back into the soil around the tree. Absolutely. And comfrey is absolutely a weed.

08:04
There's no doubt in my mind that it is a weed, but it can be a beneficial weed. So, so the big answer is no matter what you're trying to do to keep weeds from taking over, it's going to require work. It's either, it's either you have to be creative and use the weeds to your advantage, or you have to pull them by hand, or you have to put something down to smother them.

08:32
So it's going to be work no matter how you try to eradicate them. Yes. And you know, if you're trying to grow plants, you know, if, if, if you live in town and you, and you have the ability to have raised beds, um, that's, that's always easier to manage and control because you can determine what's in those boxes, but, you know, I think it, like you said, it, it comes back to.

09:00
you got to put some edible grease into it and make sure you get the root of the weed or it's just going to come right back. Yes. And while we're talking about weeds and beneficial versus not, we grew a garden at a neighbor's house five springs ago now because we didn't have our place where we live now five years ago. And she had these beautiful weeds.

09:30
that came up in our garden. And the blooms looked like the blooms on a potato plant, but they were not potato weeds. I don't know what these weeds were, but they were gorgeous. They were like cream with a burgundy center to them. And they looked like the bloom on a potato or an eggplant. Do you have any idea what those were? I am- Does this ring a bell? I am in my brain right now, trying to...

10:00
think of what it could be. They were sort of viney, but they weren't viney like a sweet potato vine. But they were beautiful. They were probably the size of a half dollar when they opened up the blooms. Oh.

10:20
I have been trying to find out. It wasn't night shade, was it? It didn't know. I don't think so. It didn't make the little berries that night shade makes. Okay, okay. So I don't know what they were, but they were beautiful. And I ended up cutting some and putting them in like a little dish, a little short dish, because I couldn't leave them there. They were too pretty. I had to bring them home. Yeah. I understand that. So.

10:47
I just didn't know if maybe it would ring a bell. But if you do happen to think of it at some point, let me know, because I would love to know what they are. They do not grow here where we are now. I have not seen them yet. So, okay. So that's pretty much the answer on what's the best way to prevent weeds from taking over. Work at it. It takes work. Yes, it takes work. I can go through kind of a checklist here, right?

11:17
mulching, ground covers, plant spacing. So spacing and putting in the right plants that are going to be able to help prevent the weeds from coming up because they're the ones that are there. The hand weeding, you know, you can use your hands, they have so many different tools now to pull weeds out. And I struggle with dandelions at my place. So I've got in, you know, in my flower beds, I've got

11:47
some tools that I don't have to lean over. I don't have to do any of that. I can stick it in the ground, turn it, and it pulls it out. So there's other methods. Killing, kind of that cultivating to allow the weeds to be pulled out once they're there, if that's the point that you're at. You can use like pre-emerging herbicides, right?

12:16
like what is the name of, I'm trying to think of the name.

12:23
of the of the pre-emerging herbicide that a lot of people like to use. It's kind of you sprinkle it down and then it stops. I have no idea. I'm sorry. That's the name of it. Okay. Yeah. So I know a lot of gardeners use prune. You can, it stops them from coming up, but also it's an herbicide. So you're putting that into the soil.

12:54
Yeah. Solarization, covering soil with, you know, like a clear either cloche or even something that's going to allow sun to get through, but not the weeds to pull out, right? So landscaping fabric, heat trapping kind of under under some

13:22
you know, like a poly plastic type of thing. So I know that there's a lot of people talk about using vinegar or salt solutions or boiling water to get rid of weeds. I have never done. I have tried it. It doesn't work well. Yeah. And for one, I've heard from people, it's not always the most effective method, but I

13:48
know, I know that sometimes some of this stuff can just get so out of control that it is very difficult to manage. So getting ahead, again that's number one, getting ahead of the weeds before they come is going to be the most important. Yeah. Okay. But these are all things you learn as you go, right? Yep. Yep. The worst weed that we have here on our property is the grass.

14:18
I don't know what kind of grass grows in the field that we till under every year, but I'm telling you, it doesn't work. We till because we have to get stuff in the garden. If we could do the no-till method, we would do that, but it doesn't work for what we're trying to do. And my husband, by the end of July, is just like, I can't pull any more grass. I just can't. And we're on our fourth.

14:48
we think 21, 22, 23, fourth spring here. And because he has tilled the garden every fall and every spring since we moved in, the growing area of the garden is now very good soil and we've amended it and we've made it really nice and it grows wonderful produce. The edges of the garden, grass everywhere to the point that you can't even see into the garden

15:18
by the end of August because the grasses are so tall. Because the mower doesn't get the very edge and he'll take the little hand scythe thing out and knock stuff down. But you know how hot last August was and the previous August was. By August, he'd just given up. He was like, I don't care. The stuff in the garden is doing great. I'm just gonna let the grasses grow. I said, okay, you do that. So.

15:46
So I guess the point is that when you're trying to do a garden plot or a raised bed or something where you want your stuff that you put in to grow, you do have to figure out a way to control the weeds because the weeds compete with the plants you put in and they don't do as well. Right. They steal nutrients and moisture from space. Yeah. But you can also cave.

16:16
at the end of the season and be like, okay, we've got one more month to go. Everything is established. It's not taking away from what we put in. Just let the weeds do their thing. You can do that too. Yes. So here, the problem with that though, is allowing any weed to go to seed. Once it goes to seed, it's going to be very difficult to get it out. It can take a lot longer. So if you can prevent.

16:46
any weed or anything from going to seed that you don't want. That is the best of it. Yep. Yep, that's the way to win the war, not the battle. Yep. Yep. Yep. The other thing that I was going to say is if you're not growing a big garden, we have peonies. Here, peonies. How are you saying? They're my favorite flower. The beautiful, the poor man's rose are my favorite

17:16
And peonies are great at keeping weeds down. Cause they shade out underneath. Yes. So I know. You need like a lot of sun. So you can always plant and I always plant either irises or some hostas around it. Because those are, yeah, the, the hostas are going to be lower and they're going to, they're going to shade out a lot of weeds as well.

17:43
Yeah, but they like shade. Yeah, right. They'll do well underneath a lot of that stuff. Okay. Yeah. I was going to say, I'm so silly. I get talking to you guys, you other people on the other podcast, and I realized that I'm being dumb about something we're doing here. We should be putting peonies around the outside of the garden because the garden gets sun all day long. Yeah. Anywhere. So I do a lot. I have a cut flower garden.

18:12
Um, and a lot of those taller, taller ones. So I have like the, the binaries that I grow and those very tall, those I'll plant next to, you know, I'll do all of the cut flowers kind of over there, but I'll do stuff in between some of that tall, those tall plants, just to make sure that nothing can come through and they're mutually beneficial.

18:37
I need to start checking Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist and all those wonderful resources for free peony roots this fall. Those are going to be hard to come by. There's always some, somebody's splitting peonies somewhere in the area. They're hard to find for free, but I grow peonies, so I've got all of them. Mm-hmm. Yep.

19:01
I'm going to talk to my husband and be like, if you want to not have to deal with the grasses around the edge of the garden, let's put peonies all the way around the garden. Yeah. And then, and as those spread too, right? Because I, I've never thought of them as the poor man's rose. I've always, like they've always been one of my absolute favorite flowers. Forever. They, there's so many different varieties. I've got the fern, peony, the red, they're gorgeous.

19:29
There's some that smell wonderful, some that are bush, some that are tall, and they're magnificent. They make the most beautiful flowers.

19:41
Yes, you are preaching to the choir. I love peonies. They are my absolute favorite flowering plant to grow. Yes, and if you can get them, if you can get your husband to put those in the garden, those will continue to produce for years. They'll spread. You can move them, you can sell them, you can give them away.

20:05
Oh yes, absolutely. We have, I think we had 60 blooms this year from plants that were put in in the last three years. Isn't that lovely? I love perennials. I, I, oh my god, they're so wonderful because they're so easy. The problem with perennials is you have to wait because I know that for peonies, the first year is sleep, the second year is creep, and the third year is leech.

20:34
So basically you put in peony roots and three springs later, you will maybe have some flowers to put in a vase in your house. Yeah. I don't know if that's true of all rhizomes and, and bulbs. Is it true of all of them? Not always, right? I just planted some, some verniculus bulbs and they're coming up right away. So it really,

21:04
It depends. I'm not a fan of hauling bulbs in the fall. I don't like to mess with that. I like as much easy, beautiful gardening as I can get. So if something can come up every year naturally and I don't have to do as much work, that's what I'm going to go for. Otherwise, some of those things are best grown in pots.

21:27
Mm-hmm. Yep. We tried growing dahlias last summer. I'd never grown them before and After we put them in I realized that we're gonna have to take them out you know winter because they don't winter over and I decided to be a rebel and I was like I didn't like them enough to grow them again So we're just gonna leave them right where they are and see if they somehow do winter over They do not and I do not care because I'm never growing dahlias again

21:57
They're really pretty, but I don't love them enough to keep growing them. So, but those are bulbs and I don't wanna have to worry about digging them out and doing all the work to preserve them over the winter time. I know lots of people love it and do it and they do it really well. I am not one of them. Yeah, I've kind of been that person too. I know, and I've planted them.

22:25
You know, you can get them in the baskets with all the holes in it so that it's easier to pull them out in the fall. And still I'm like, uh, we'll see. Put some mulch on it. See what happens. Yeah. I didn't think they'd make it. And my husband said, do you want me to dig those out? And I was like, no, leave them. We're going to be rebel gardeners for the winter. We're going to see if they come back. I don't cut anything back in the fall. Nothing. I don't cut anything. Yeah. He said, you don't really like it.

22:55
Yeah, he said, you don't really like the dollies, do you? I said, nope, I would much rather grow peonies. They're easy, they're low maintenance, and they're beautiful. He said, okay, I will get you all the peony bulbs you want. I was like, really? Honest, can we make the whole property of peonies? He said, no.

23:11
I was very sad in that moment because I really wanted to make the whole property peonies, but he said no. Slowly accumulate. I'll work on him. It'll be okay. Especially when I tell him that if he plants peony plants all the way around the garden, it'll cut down on the problems with the grass coming in. So yeah, I planted mint around the garden and that has been doing a really, really good job of keeping and chamomile.

23:40
of keeping weeds coming and grass. Yeah, time too. Time is good because it's a lower to the ground plant and it's really thick. Yep, creeping time is really great for that.

23:55
Yeah, and actually culinary time too. We had some and we didn't have a single piece of grass coming up through the time because it was so thick.

24:05
So yeah, time can do it. The pineapple weed, I don't know if that's the real word for it, it's like wild chamomile or something. That grows here everywhere. And I would love to have my lawn be wild, a wild, sorry, pineapple weed. Because when you step on it, it smells so good. Yeah, it does. I have a wooly time all over because I love the smell of that and the texture of it.

24:34
Yeah. Yeah. So there are solutions here that are lovely and useful and smell good and are fun to talk about. So I'm really glad that our friend on Facebook asked on the gardening group that I pulled the question from asked the question because weeds are. Let's be honest. Weeds are a pain in the ass. Yep.

24:58
But if you can, if you can, I don't know, tame seems to be the wrong word. Corral them and direct the ones that you want to do things you want them to do for you, I think they can be fine. Absolutely. Oh, and I recommend anybody get like a weed app or an identifying, like a plant identifier app. I think Google has one. I know there's a app called Seek. And it's not always 100%, but if you're unsure about what something is, you pull that up.

25:27
open the app, it'll, it'll look at it and likely identify, you know, the genus species, all of those pieces for you. So you can, it'll tell you if it's, if it's got medicinal qualities, if it's natural, if it's invasive, those types of things. Because a lot of those things that we probably think are weeds that are like I, for years, I probably went in my woods and thought, you know, a lot of these things are weeds and then come to, to investigate that no, a lot of that is

25:56
natural and medicinal.

26:01
Yes, and one of the coolest ones is catnip. Oh, yeah, I have it everywhere. Mike, and that's probably why I have so many cats. I'd like to think that's the reason why. Uh huh. Yeah, we have catnip growing all over the property and catnip actually likes its feet wet. I didn't know this. So last summer, last, okay, last spring, I was so excited because I knew catnip grew, grew everywhere on the property. And I was going to.

26:31
harvest it when it started growing and I was going to dry it and put it in cute little bags and put a cute label on it and sell it at the farmers market for people who have cats. And then it dried out at the end of what? June last year? And all the catnip died. There was no catnip growing anywhere in our yard last year. I was like, well so much for making the cats happy this summer at the farmers market. Well, this year. Yeah, it was just so dry.

27:00
Hopefully, yeah, I haven't seen any yet, but who knows, we'll see what happens. That's not true. My cat, my barn cat, actually did find some catnip. She's crazy. Her name is Floof, and she found the only catnip that was growing so far this year, and she walked up to my husband with it in her mouth, and he split it off because she has...

27:29
We kept one of her kittens from last fall and he split the catnip and gave the other piece to the other cat and Chirp had never seen catnip before and she was crazy. After she ate it, she was running around our yard like she was on steroids. So our cats have benefited so far this spring from one place of catnip on the property. Oh my!

27:52
Well, you need some more. You let me know. So it's growing. I just gotta find it. I got it all over. Yes. I would love to do the cute little packets of it to sell. Because I think that, I think the catnip you get at the store is crap. We bought it for our cats before, you know, before we had our own source of catnip. And they would, they'd sniff it and bat at it and chew on it. But they didn't ever seem very happy with it.

28:22
The catnip growing here is so fresh that it's more intense. And so they love it. And the other thing that I didn't know about catnip is catnip has exactly the opposite effect on dogs. It actually mellows dogs out. I have not seen my dogs try to eat it yet, although maybe they have, but even the raw catnip, right, you pull a leaf off, my cats will go.

28:52
Crazy for it. Two on it, rub on it.

28:58
Yeah, when we had our dog spayed three years ago now, we had catnip dried from the first crop from the first year we were here. And I had read that catnip had a sedative effect on dogs. And the vet had told us that she absolutely should not be jumping at all because the incision would tear.

29:24
And she's a mini Australian Shepherd, so she's crazy. She's always jumping and running up the stairs and stuff. No. And so she immediately, the morning after she was spayed, she was trying to jump on the couch and jump on the bed and just be her normal self. And I grabbed some of the dried catnip because I knew she liked catnip. She was always sniffing it when we gave it to the cats. And I put some in my hand and I was like, Maggie, come here. And she walked over and I rolled my hand open and she stuck her nose in there and just like.

29:52
ate it out of my hand and went and laid down and was laid down for a good hour. And she wasn't passed out, but she was just actually being a good girl and being in a restful state. So anytime she wound up for the next few days, I would give her some catnip and she would go lay down. So apparently it works. Okay. We'll be harvesting that then.

30:16
I've got to... Yes, catnip is one of the best. My two big English mastiffs, I don't think I'd have to give them anything to just be chill. They're probably still in bed right now, actually. So while you were... Since we've been talking about weeds, and I know we don't have a whole lot of time left, I wanted to... Yeah, that's fine. I do a lot of research on herbal medicine. And...

30:45
I like to grow and use plants for their natural potential. And you were talking about comfrey earlier. So I pulled out my big book and started looking up the medicinal uses of comfrey that grows naturally here. So the self-help on it is

31:14
acne and boils fractures fungal skin infections healing wounds inflamed skin rashes and stiff and aching joints. And it does talk about clinical research that's been done. It was mostly done in Germany. But making like a poultice rates or an ointment out of out of the leaves had a let's see in a 2007 study.

31:42
Physicians rated that the efficacy of a comfrey leaf cream and healing abrasions was very good effective in 93% of cases and complete healing took four days with comfrey and seven days with a placebo. So it's known for its anti-inflammatory in osteoarthritis, back pain, sprains.

32:12
So that's, it looks like the leaves, the leaves are the best poultice are going to make the best, but you can make an infused oil also. So if you were to take comfrey and make a salve or an infused oil out of it, and then add honey, you would have antibacterial as well as anti-inflammatory.

32:35
That's interesting. I may have to look into this because I make stuff like that. Oh, I love it. Yeah. So that would be this one wouldn't be recommended for like, the retina gestion necessarily, right? Like, so there's some that you can write, you know, you can make a tincture, put it on your tongue. This would be you're going to make an oil to you know, like a if you think of like a tiger balm or you know, something like that, it's going to be something that you're going to want to put on your skin.

33:05
instead of, yeah, ingesting. Yes. So again, just prove the point that not all weeds are terrible things that need to not exist. We need some of this stuff. Yes, yes.

33:19
All right, awesome. All right, Liz, thank you so much. Thank you, bye. Bye.