Weeds - the Garden Nightmare

Plants themselves are great at combating weeds but the plants have to be fully grown and established to be at their most effective.

Controlling weeds usually falls into four categories:

• Chemical Weed Killers
• Mulching
• Manual Weeding
• Machine (Mowing or Cultivator)

Chemical weed killers are probably the most common form of weed control in the domestic garden and the use of herbicides are highly effective in dealing with most type of weed including the persistent perennial weeds that are the blight of most gardeners.

Mulching is another, but not so highly effective method of weed control which works on the principal of depriving the weeds of the essential light they need to grow. Organic mulches are fine but the non-organis mulches tend to be more effective because they form a truly impervious barrier, a good and simple example would be a black bin liner.

Manual Weeding means exactly that, lots of manual work but if done correctly with roots being extracted then the process is highly effective.

Machine weed control is probably the least effective bearing in mind that the most common form is mowing. The effective of moving lawns full of weeds might offer a short term fix but the long effects can be horrendous as seeds off shoots can be spread further throughout the garden. Cultivating, again is only effective when the weeds can be removed by hand to eliminate re-growth.