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Weeds! The bane of the gardener! How to get rid of the pesky things? Here are several things you can do to help reduce or almost eliminate them from your garden.

One of the best ways is to understand which weed you are dealing with. You can pull them by hand, but the easiest way is to smother them out. You can add mulches, and /or cover crops to the problem areas to help you control the weeds.

When starting a new bed, you can till the area. Wait several days and till again, the second time till very shallowly, the new weed seeds will have come to the top during your first tilling. By tilling shallowly, you eliminate the second generation. At the point you want to plant your vegetables or flowers. Once planted, consider using a cover crop for those areas not covered. Something like annual rye, which germinates in about 7 days and dies back in the cold weather, is a great choice until your seedlings are up and growing.

Don't have access to a tiller or don't want to use one? Then try the "lasagna gardening" method created and written about by Patricia Lanza. This method uses layers of wet newspaper, peat moss, composted animal manure and other organic materials put down in layers and covered with mulch. This method smothers out weed seeds and encourages earthworms to take up housekeeping in your garden soil. The bed can be build as deep as you have materials to work with. Over time it begins to break down, at which point you should have dark black soil, with many earthworms. You just keep adding layers as you go along. Few weeds can survive in this environment.

You can also use certain herbicides to control weeds. Although I prefer and usually practice nothing but "organic" methods on my yard and garden. I will use Roundup for persistent quack grass. I follow the directions carefully and apply the product with an old paint brush, so I'm sure I have no "drift" anywhere it shouldn't be.

On the lawn, you can dig up a problem area and heavily over seed the area with new grass seed. If you use a mix of regular grass seed of your choice and some annual rye, you can get good germination of your grass. The annual rye germinates rapidly, and chokes out any weed seedlings until the regular grass can germinate and grow.

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