I live in the North Shore of Sydney where the soil is fertile and it rains a lot and the blocks are big. There are lots of weeds in the garden such as Peruvian lilies and couch grass and more recently madeira vines.
How do you manage weeds?
I grow citrus and other fruit trees and a few herbs and plan to grow more. I want to keep the garden as organic as possible and am worried about the side effects of glyphosate (e.g. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weed-whacking-herb…).
I've been using Agent Orange, and was recently told that I wasn't allowed to.
If anyone has some good alternatives which don't take a week to kick in, I'd really like to know too
Can't tell if serious, but if you are, I expect your neighbours' kids having all sorts of birth abnormalities
-Insert narcissism joke-
Yeah I was setting myself up for that question :)
If you have too much weed, I guess you can sell it.
Steam or hot water can be used as weed control. How this is applied depends on the size of your block. For our small backyard we boil the kettle and pour boiling hot water on the weeds.
An interesting read on other alternatives -
http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/life-style/gardening/…
The boiling water sounds interesting. How much do you need? Do you douse the weed - because I would imagine you'd need to boil the kettle quite a few times.
You don't need much water, a few kettles for splashing across the weeds. It is the heat that does the damage. You will need to go back one or more times later in the week to kill the weeds. Of course hand weeding is the most effective - if you have time or are rich enough to pay someone else.
Difficult question with no single answer. If the area is small removing weeds by hand works well, but is boring and time consuming :( Various chemical weed killers are not bad, but expensive and you can never be sure that they target weeds only (pets? children? birds? other plants?).
What worked for me after many years of experimenting (large area) is a small sturdy ground cover plant. In my case it is evergreen with small flowers, spreads very nicely and kills all weeds in natural way - it is simply stronger! Also it is maintenance free and grows in sun and shade. I am not sure what it is, but the nearest match I found searching on the net for "look alike" is creeping thyme:
http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/herbs/thyme/growing-c…
and here: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/81722/#b
Of course you need to experiment to find which ground cover one you like, and more importantly: which one grows well in your place.
I'm definitely going to give the creeping thymes a go. Where did you get them?
I bought a flame thrower thing that uses the hairspray butane cans. It works but takes longer than you would think, and obs no good during a fire ban.
It is better than spray for targeting a weed in the lawn, but not good enough for large jobs.
I still use spray for weeds I paths etc.
For dandelions, the leverage "grandpas weeded" is unbeatable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H5BJGZvDtU
My conclusion is manual or spray is all that really works.
Longer term I want to landscape the problem away like derek324 is doing.
When I was a kid, my slightly crazy uncle built a proper flamethrower to use when backburning on his property. In retrospect, no doubt highly illegal and wouldn't have looked out of place in a Mad Max film.
With the fuel flow turned down, it did, however, make for a great spot-weedkiller.
It would also be a great way to stand-out on the North Shore of Sydney. OP, you could also take it around to Tony Abbott's place and let him borrow it.
To get the budget through the senate, he may need to use it on Clive Palmer…
use pea straw as a mulch for weeds that grow from seeds [3 sheets of news paper underneath for couch etc]..for bulbs try putting a small amount of sewing machine oil at the base between the 2 center leaves this will travel down and smother the bulb [dishwashing liquid may also work]..as for burning and boiling water this will only kill the surface growth of the weeds most weeds will resurface from the same roots
subscribing as I'm interested in the topic too…