Mulching: The Secret to Less Weeding!

Gardening and weeding tend to go hand in hand. Mulching a garden can help prevent weeds and therefore make for easy gardening.

Mulch is simply covering the bare earth with organic matter. If you leave bare earth exposed, weed seeds will germinate. It is that simple really.

Some mulch ideas include straw, hay, leaves, wood chips, bark chips or even a few layers of newspaper or cardboard!

It breaks up the healthy soil structure, but you know what else it does? Brings up a thousand million trillion little weed seeds! Exposes them all to the sunlight and then they germinate!

Reasons to NOT Rototill

First remove all weeds. Pulling weeds, including the entire root ball of each, is the best way to prevent them from coming back, then mulch to prevent new weeds.

If you are planning to start a new garden bed in an area covered with grass or weeds, cover them with cardboard, wet newspaper, contractor brown paper or something similar, to smother them.

Then wet down that layer of cardboard or paper well, and layer a good 6" of mulch on top of it. This layering process will smother the weeds and grass below, killing them.

One you have your garden beds ready, you can really use almost anything as mulch, but ideally, it should be some form of organic matter that will decompose naturally.

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