How to Keep Weeds from Ruining Your Garden

Every gardener loves their garden and despises weeds. One magic ingredient added to your garden will help you enjoy the fruits and veggies of your labor without hours of weeding: straw. There are a couple of different methods you can use to bed down your garden with straw. You can till up your ground just as you would typically, plant your produce, wait for it to emerge and then you can spread the straw up and down each row and around each plant. The straw will cover the dirt and block out a place for the weeds to sprout up. If a weed does come up, which some will still manage to do, take a flake of straw and place it right on top of the weed blocking it completely from the sun.

The second method you can you with straw is the Ruth Stouts method. See the below to read more about Ruth. This involves covering your garden with straw and not tilling in the spring. Instead you push aside the straw down the row you want to plant, wait for your plants to come up, and then tuck the straw in around the plants.

So are there other advantages to using straw in the garden aside from the huge help of having less weeds? Yes! If you do still want to pull weeds that peek out from the straw, the weeds are much easier to yank out of the ground similar to the difference between weeding your flower bed with bark mulch and weeds out of the hard ground. Straw also holds in moisture to the ground. While the top of the straw will get wet with rain, the water will run down to the ground and stay moist with the straw acting as blanket. If you garden with straw you won’t have to worry about getting mud shoes! After a rain, I walk right out into my garden and tend to it as if it hadn’t rained because any mud is under the straw safely away from my feet. When it’s time to pick green beans and I’m crawling around between the rows, I stay quite clean compared to a garden with no straw. Not only do you keep yourself cleaner, but your produce will also be cleaner! Using straw is a great option for gardeners who want to go organic because chemicals once used to kill weeds are no longer needed. Lastly using straw in your garden allows you to prepare a healthy spot for your garden. The straw will slowing break down into the soil and create a natural layer of healthy decomposition to create fertile soil.

How do you start you might ask? Well you could go to a farm store to buy straw at about $6 a bale in the Midwest. Or you could find a local farmer and ask if they sell straw; if they don’t just ask who in the area does. My dad sells straw for $3 a bale, which is a big discount. Or ask if they happen to have any wet or molded straw that they would give you for a discount (or free). Wet bales can’t be used on animals or to sell in stores but if you are using them in the garden they work just fine. My garden is approximately 75’ long by 20’ wide in size and I started with 30 wet bales of straw. The next year I added about 10 to manage the weeds.

To read more about Ruth Stout, click here.