Now weeds can become an issue in any garden. I want to show you a few of the ways that I’ve learned to, let’s say, deal with weeds in the landscape.

One effective way of avoiding weeds that’s easier than laying landscape fabric is to use a pre-emerging herbicide. These chemical barriers kill weeds before they can grow and are available in organic versions.

The way that pre-emergence works is that we have a chemical herbicide that’s coated on to particles of clay. Those are in this little bottle and I’m going to shake them out evenly over the soil just like the directions described. Now this next step here is that it’s time for me to add some water, and the water is supposed to be added fairly gently so I have a little shower in here and evenly. And what this is doing is that this is allowing the chemical that’s coated on this little particle here to mix into my water solution to be on top of the soil surface there. And if the soil dries, it leaves this residue, and that layer of that residual is my weed control.

Basically, I’ve got a thin layer of chemical all over the soil here. And then, you could leave it like this or you could do what I like to do. I’m going to spread a couple inches of mulch over the top of this. This mulch will also help to keep anyone, animals, people or whatever from disturbing my layer of chemical control here, because if you take your foot and move the soil, or you take a tool and go to dig a hole in there, now you have a hole in that barrier or that layer of chemical that you put down there. The good thick 4 to 5 inches of mulch is going to block out a good portion of your weeds anyways. Because we have that added layer of chemical, we’ve just got even better control.

So there we have it. Pre-emergence should be applied, it should be protected with something like this mulch, and then you try and leave it alone so that you can maintain your weed control.