Spend Less time weeding in your garden

After years of maintaining gardens for my clients, I have become more and more experienced developing strategies to reduce labour and create an environment that requires less maintenance.

Traditional maintenance is intensive maintenance and includes tasks such as repeatedly weeding the same spaces between plants, continually watering or even installing irrigation for the drier months.  As an eco-friendly more sustainable gardener, I strive to not only reduce the maintenance time required but also reduce intensive interference and allow the garden to somewhat take care of itself.

A different way of planting

I find most gardens I am asked to manage are planted in a similar way. Plants are spaced far apart with large areas of exposed soil in between. Often, if the garden is not maintained regularly, these areas are covered by weeds, and this is for a reason.

The traditional approach of leaving space between plants is founded in the idea that plants need room to gain sufficient nutrients, water and light. This is certainly true for designs where plants are not compatible with each other in terms of requirements, such as nutrient, water and light. Intensive maintenance is needed because each plant needs tending to individually. One might need more moisture while another requires more drainage. Plants might become overshadowed by their neighbour, resulting in restricted light, so they are spaced apart which leaves a lot of soil exposed in between.

By reducing the empty space, we can reduce weeds, and this is where naturalistic planting comes in. So, what needs to change to enable plants to be placed be placed closer together? The answer lies in the concept of “natural plant communities” and adapting them for our gardens.

In nature plants grow closely together in a tight knit patch. Each plant has their niche in the community and has a slightly different role, allowing them to grow closer together too. For example, some plants are low growing, spreading and shade tolerant and cover the ground between plants whereas others such as Eupatorium for example grow upright with not a lot of leaves along the base, allowing other plants to grow at its feet.

Eupatorium

Bare Soil attracts weeds

Bare soil is where ruderals flourish. These plants are short lived (often annual) and self-seed into disturbed soil, germinating quickly. Some ornamental & self-seeding plants are welcome, amongst which are Helleborus, Verbena or Alchemilla mollis. However, most annual weeds also fall into this category too.

You might be familiar with a dense covering of Euphorbia peplus seedlings or bittercress, where the seedheads explode as soon as you touch them. The problem is, the more we weed and disturb the soil, the more we create perfect conditions for these ruderals to germinate. That is why they are often found in well-cared for gardens in between plants on bare patches of soil.

However, we can take advantage of ruderal garden plants by introducing them to a new planting that has yet to establish, allowing them to quickly fill any spare spaces, providing some early flowering whilst the rest of the planting gets established. Once the gaps have filled out by the other plants, the ruderals will disappear, but their seeds will stay in the soil, allowing them to quickly pop up again if a gap emerges.

A naturalistic, densely- planted garden will still have weeds popping up. This is unavoidable if, for example, a plant dies and leaves a gap or an opportunistic weed such as bind weed finds itself encircling an Echinacea flower stem or hiding amongst a climbing Clematis. But the amount of time and effort spent on weeding is much reduced when the ground is covered by plants.

Can mulching help supress weeds? There is an argument for applying a thick layer of mulch to suppress weeds and I am all for mulch as a way of improving soil health and supplying nutrients to plants. However, in my experience, mulch will only suppress weeds for a short period of time and, if by mid-spring the bare areas are not covered by plants, weeds will move in just the same.  

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing more satisfying as a gardener than weeding through a dense patch of small weeds and admiring the freshly turned over soil which perfectly sets of the greens of the border plants. It looks so neat and tidy! But it is worth asking yourself the question as to whether the cost and time involved in essentially maintaining areas of bare soil is sustainable. And also, whether the space could be used more effectively to create not only more interest for us but also benefit our wildlife through habitats and soil health.