An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure

We learned a lot of lessons in our first year of flower farming but one of the biggest was about weeds. Weeds are always going to be a challenge in flower farming, but, as we learned, it’s definitely better to plan for ways to mitigate weeds as much as possible rather than try to hand-to-hand combat against weeds that have taken over the garden.

This year, we were only able to build three 75-foot rows for flowers (in addition to the six 12-foot rows closer to the house where we planted both vegetables and flowers, following the plan in Lisa Mason Ziegler’s Vegetables Love Flowers book.) We had a lot to do to plow a field that had been used for decades as a grazing field for dairy cows, then as a horse pasture, and then as a hay pasture.  Great soil, just needed a lot of work to get it where we needed to build raised beds. We plowed the field, tilled the soil, measured out rows and walking paths, built the rows, tilled compost into the soil, remeasured the rows, rebuilt the beds, and figured out how to pull Bio 360 over the rows. By that time, we really needed to get our transplants into the ground.

So, we really didn’t think much about the walking paths between the rows. We had measured them out to be about 24 inches which meant that the mower was not going to go through there. I’m not sure how much we even researched how to set up walking paths (and we researched everything!) There were just too many other things we needed to do.

And what happened? Well, weeds happened. For a while, it seemed OK. The flowers seemed to be doing really well. We were able to pull weeds that had snuck up through the Bio 360 in the rows, everything felt like it was in control.

Until it wasn’t.  The weeds just invaded the paths between the rows. You probably won’t seem many pictures like this in your Instagram feed. It’s pretty embarrassing how bad the weeds got out of control. Taller than the flowers, deep roots, all of them just defiantly proclaiming “just try and pull me out of here”.  My favorite tool for the job ended up just being a garden knife where I sliced roots near the base, pulled them out, tossed them aside and then carted them to the compost pile. It was sort of satisfying in a sinister way but a ton of work.

We eventually laid cardboard and woodchips down on one of the two walking paths and that worked really well to keep the weeds at bay.  But the damage had been done. Six-foot tall weeds caused our single-stem sunflowers to panic and put on lots of little offshoots and blooms. Our calendula could have a much longer growing season if weeds hadn’t choked off their upward trajectory. It frankly was a lot less fun to walk though the garden when so many weeds blocked the paths.

Lesson learned.  As we get geared up for our fall planting, you can bet your bottom dollar that we are planning for how we are going to keep weeds out of our walking paths.