Pulling Weeds - A Must When Growing Your Own Food

in homesteading •  7 years ago  (edited)

Most farmers and gardeners hate it, and I am no exception. However, though odious, pulling weeds is a chore that has great importance.

Before - these are my four biggest papaya trees and I've neglected pulling weeds under them.

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Pulling weeds near the roots of your fruits and veggies is important, because you may already know that weeds rob your plants of needed nutrients.

The idea is to pull the whole weed up, roots included, to ensure they don't come back. If you just give the weeds a haircut, well, you can guess what will happen.

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Like my post earlier, all living things are vying for survival - weeds included. Without human intervention, weeds would take over and I wouldn't have a garden.

After - this took me about 15 minutes just to weed under these 4 papayas. I could've gotten the weedwacker and been done in 1 minute, but then they would just keep growing back...

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If you're thinking about homesteading or gardening, there are certain things you can do cut down on pulling weeds, because it's a very monotonous job.

Now, you could use roundup, but that contains toxic chemicals and have been found in numerous water and air samples across the country in higher than safe amounts.

Here is a link to a webpage that is entitled "11 Ways to Control Weeds Withiut Chemicals":
http://www.networx.com/article/11-ways-to-control-weeds-without-chemica

Thanks for stopping by, Steemians!

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This post received a 3.4% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @vegansilverstack! For more information, click here!

what kind of cool tropical place do you live? We hate weeding and my wife is always putting something down or another to try to avoid it. PS I love the fact you snuck in the word odius, it's my second favorite word after serendipitous.

Ha the only reason I know about the word odious is because in Spanish, "odioso" is much more frequently used that "odious" in English. (Means the same thing). I live in southern Florida, and I have 1/3 acre and most of it is garden so yeah I don't like weeding... maybe if I had 5x less and weeding was more like a thing I had to do once in a while then yeah.... but I hate it because I do it everyday at some point or another. Now if it's just for like 2-3 minutes yeah it's fine but more than 5 minutes and it's a chore to me. :-)

I actually find weeding to be a relaxing chore, so don't mind it so much. But I absolutely agree that you have to remove the whole weed or it just grows back. And take it right out of the garden. I've made the mistake of just pulling the weeds and leaving them on top of the soil, but some varieties will continue to grow and spread if you do that.

Indeed! I find it nice sometimes when it's not too much work, maybe just under one tree. Gets me outside too. :)

Hey your papaya are looking good! How long does it take for them to fruit? Mine are just two years old and not near that big.

I'm actually going to do an update post on them here in a little bit! Hmm, mine are probably about two years old too and my first one just finally started fruiting. So you probably don't have too long! I would guess end of this season, but maybe next season. I noticed that once the heavy rain started coming, that's when it went into serious flower time.

Sweet! Thanks for the reply...I'll check out the new post. I do know the heavy rains have had a positive affect on most of my vegetation..in fact it looks like a jungle out there lol. Have a great night!

I actually enjoy weeding in the vegetable gardens. I find it relaxing, and very rewarding. To see a nice tidy veg bed at the end of the job is very satisfying.

Weeding is also good to help control slugs and snails. Inevitably you find a lot of them hiding in the weeds so they have to go!

Indeed they do!

After a full day shift of loud machines and stinky co-workers I sometimes find pulling weeds to be quite relaxing too. There is some grass around my blueberries that is giving me grief through. And the goji berries keep popping up all over.

Yeah that would be nice after a day of that. :)