Environmentally-Friendly Organic Weed Control
Resist the urge to apply herbicides all over your lawn to kill weeds. Herbicides will kill innocent plants as well as the weeds. In addition, they will also leach into the soil and groundwater. This will make your garden a toxic environment for both yourself, your pets, and your children. The use of pesticides will leave a film on any food that you grow, rendering your produce unsafe for consumption.
Environmentally-friendly organic weed control will require more work, but it will benefit your garden in the long run. To follow are some tips on how to remove existing weeds without the use of pesticides.
Organic Weed Control: Uproot them
- Use a garden fork to remove the weeds by their roots. Be careful not to damage the roots of plants that you want to keep.Be careful not to redistribute their seeds.
Organic Weed Control: Smother them
- Cover weeds with weed matting, mulch, or newspaper to starve them of sunlight. Weeds will die after a few weeks without sunlight.
Organic Weed Control: Solar cook them
- Cover the weeds with black plastic in hot weather. The black will attract sunlight, which will cause heat to build up under the plaster, which will kill the weeds and their seeds.
Organic Weed Control: Burn them
- Apply steam or boiling water to the weeds to kill them.
Organic Weed Control: Generate competition
- Grow other plants and ground covers and hand-pull weed seedlings as they appear. Once the plants are established, they will block out the sun for new weeds.
Organic Weed Control: Block them out
- Consider applying pebbles to your garden to block out sunlight from weeds. Pebbles will still allow rainwater to seep into the ground.