Every year we plant a garden and it does great in April, May, and early June. But come late June and early July things would normally start to slip. Usually, by the time we’d get to mid-July the weeds were out of control and I’d given up on everything but our berries and any pole beans that out-raced the weeds. Mr. Fix-It would till between the rows and big spaces to help me keep up, but by the end of July our garden was a goner.
It’s terrible to admit to being a gardening failure when you’re a farmer! But for several years it was the same story. But I’ve hit on a few things that really helped us get it back under control the last couple years, and most of them are pretty frugal.
One of them is to use brown paper bags from the grocery store as a weed barrier. Simple, effective, frugal–actually FREE.
We do our grocery shopping in our truck 90% of the time, which means my backseat is full of farm kids {smile} and groceries have to go in the back. I don’t know if you’ve ever had groceries in plastic bags loose in the bed of your truck while driving home, but let me just say…NO. Always a mess. Thankfully, our grocery story doesn’t charge extra for paper bags! They stand up neatly and hold everything together at the tailgate–as long as you don’t drive like a crazy-person!
So our kiddos are well-trained to always say “May we have paper, please!”
Then we get home and I stash them in the mudroom. All of them. We use them for firestarters. For packing up donations. For carrying boots while traveling. {smile} And for the gardening trick I’m about to show you.
This is a baby pepper plant on the verge of being overwhelmed by weeds in our garden…
STEP ONE
When you’re first starting out, you want to weed real good all around the plant in the row. Pull back any mulch you might have already put in place. Pluck out all your crabgrass runners. Get everything out of there.
If you’re really good, you would just lay the paper bags when you put the plants in. But I’ve got three “helpers” every time I plant a couple of rows and just getting the plants safely in the ground is our real gardening step one. Then momma takes a coffee break! {smile}
STEP TWO
Soak all your brown bags in a bucket of water. You can do this at the same time you’re doing the weeding. You can soak a lot or a few at a time. But you want to make sure they are wet all the way through.
This is a great job for little garden helpers. They love splashing around in the water.
STEP THREE
Pull your bags out of the water and lay them out like a mat all around your plants. You can put them right up against the base of the plant. It’s ok if the bags rip while coming out of the water. You might need to rip them up anyway to fit the space you have. Don’t worry about overlapping the paper. You can make the layer as thick as you want, depending on how many bags you have. Having coverage is more important than having depth.
STEP FOUR
Cover the paper bags up with mulch. You can see here that we use pine straw for mulch for about half the year. We have a pine tree farm, so we have lots of pine straw available. {smile} You can use whatever you have available. Plain straw will work fine as well and we use that the second half of the year. I just recommend something organic that will help your garden soil as it breaks down.
When I did this the first time, I went plant-by-plant, weeding, wrapping, and then covering. Now I do a whole row at a time.
STEP FIVE
When you finish, go back through the row and water everything real well again. The water does two things for your garden. One, it holds the paper down so it can do its job and smother the weeds. But two, it also provides water to your plants and the moisture stays in the paper much longer under that mulch than if it was open to the air.
In the picture below, you can see a finished section of peppers. You can also see the weeds around the Brussel sprouts on the right that haven’t been done yet.
Since it’s just paper, eventually the bag will break down and compost into your soil. That means that eventually your weeds will come back. {sigh}
So as the season progresses and things start to look like this around the edges…
It’s time to get out some more bags. But this time, just wet them and lay them on top. On top of the mulch. On top of the weeds. On top of everything but your plant. Make sure they are soaking wet, then put more mulch on top of the second layer and keep going. Eventually it all breaks down into your garden soil. Last year I had to re-layer bags and mulch about three times to keep control of the weeds. I’ve heard that over time you’ll kill off the weed seed growth and you’ll just have fewer and fewer weeds each year. Since I haven’t been a very good gardener up to this point, I’ve probably got a ways to go to see that happen!
So besides being frugal, being safe organic soil amendment, and being a waste-reducing reuse project, the other great thing about using brown paper bags is that it supports sustainable tree farms! {Here’s a great Op-Ed in Edible New Orleans about the impacts of using paper bags on the environment.}
I’ve heard that over time you’ll kill off the weed seed growth and you’ll just have fewer and fewer weeds each year. Since I haven’t been a very good gardener up to this point, I’ve probably still got a long way to go on that front. But we’ll be fighting the good fight and eating the good stuff again this year.
Do you have any great gardening or weed-fighting tips? We’ll be sharing more this month in our newsletter. And be sure to follow our Pinterest gardening boards for other great tips!
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