Maintain a Weedless Organic Garden
(Page 3 of 4)
June/July 2007
Story and Photos by Lee Reich
2. Mainline piping. Also called a lateral line, this piping connects the water supply to feeder tubes.
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3. Fittings. You’ll need a variety of fittings, such as valves, connectors and end caps, to connect irrigation lines, close them off, control the flow of water, and keep it from flowing back into the main water source.
4. Filters. Sand or screen filters pull impurities from the main water supply to keep feeder tubes from clogging.
5. Pressure regulators. Spring or valve regulators help reduce water pressure to the feeder tubes.
I use a drip irrigation system in parts of my garden that need regular watering, such as vegetables and young blueberry bushes.
In my vegetable garden, I run half-inch mainline piping perpendicular to the 3-foot wide beds. Then I plug in a quarter-inch barbed transfer fitting, and attach quarter-inch feeder tubing and run it down the length of the bed. The tubing comes with emitters at 6-inch intervals, each dripping a half gallon of water per hour. For wider beds, in drier climates, or locations with lighter soils, you might want to run two dripper lines down each bed.
Young blueberry bushes require at least 1 inch of water a week, since they have shallow root systems. To water them, I run half-inch mainline piping along the row of plants, then plug a quarter-inch barbed transfer fitting into the mainline piping at each bush. I attach a short length of quarter-inch solid tubing to the mainline, which is terminated by an emitter that drips a half gallon per hour at the roots of each bush. For more on drip irrigation systems, read “Irrigation Made Easy,” August/September 2002.
EFFECTIVE WEEDING
Weeds constantly threaten to invade the edges of any garden. The most direct way to thwart interloping weeds is to just grab them by hand and pull them out. I also maintain a 6-inch-wide bare soil “Maginot line” of defense around parts of my garden with a Winged Weeder hoe, which has a sharp blade that lies parallel to the ground as you work with it. In a more formal part of the garden, I created a low-maintenance weed barrier with half cinder blocks laid flat right next to each other in a fitted, shallow depression, so I can run the wheel of my lawn mower along it.
If you have ever chopped the tops off dandelions with a hoe, you know that it’s only a short time before they sprout yet again from their robust roots. To eliminate the possibility of an encore, I pull out these weeds individually to be sure I get their tops along with their roots.
Removing one weed at a time would be too tedious where a colony of young weed seedlings has sprouted. When this happens, I recommend using a hoe to kill the small seedlings. I think the traditional garden hoe that most gardeners have hanging in their garage is far better at mixing concrete than killing weeds. A better choice is a collinear hoe, stirrup hoe or the Winged Weeder (see photo in the Image Gallery). With a Winged Weeder, a few simple strokes back and forth (like mopping a floor), just a hair beneath the soil’s surface, will do the job quickly while you barely break a sweat.
