Gardening | Why Gardening is Better...

You can get down and dirty in the garden alone, out in the front yard, and the neighbours don?t think you are a pervert. You can talk openly about your ultimate fantasy garden with everyone from your neighbours next door to your grandma. It?s not embarrassing to walk into a nursery or garden centre and purchase gardening implements. It doesn?t kill the mood if you talk during gardening.

Gardening can be one of the most rewarding experiences of life. Creating a beautiful oasis where once there was nothing. When people say they don?t like gardening, they aren?t talking about the joy of planning and planting out their patch or watching their plants flourish and flower, but more about the arduous tasks such as weeding and mowing. I am here to offer all you non believers (that is gardening haters) a path to the gardening heaven.

Even I hate weeding, and I have been a passionate gardener since I was in my teens. So how do you cut down the task of weeding? Here is how I do it.

All my perennial garden beds have weedmat laid on them. If you haven?t come across weedmat before, you are in for a sweet surprise. It cuts your weeding by 95%, and the weeds that do manage to root in the weed mat pull out so easy that a preschooler could do it. Now don?t confuse weedmat with that horrible old black plastic that use to be laid on garden beds back in the 70?s. That black plastic did horrible and unspeakable things to the soil, making the ground pretty much unusable and rock like. Weed mat allows the soil to breath, water to penetrate and fertilisers that are applied over weedmat also permeate through it to the plant roots.

Weedmat will stop not only couch grass, but oxalis and nutgrass. True. I laid it directly over a rose bed that was badly infested with all bar the nut grass over three years ago, and apart from the odd part growing out the edge of the weed mat, my rose bed has been weed free. There are a couple of different types of weedmat and all have their merits. Jute weed mat is great if you can get hold of it. It allows a litte bit more weed penetration than the following two, but is great for the environment, and also acts as a mulch, retaining water. Woven weedmat is probably the most heavy duty out of them all. It is fine strips of plastic that are woven into a cloth. This was the weedmat that defeated my oxalis and couch grass.

Enviro weedmat is also quite good. It sort of looks like that iron on interface that you get on clothes, but it is black. It breaks down after about 4 or 5 years. It?s only downfall is that sharp stick and rocks will tear it quite easily.

Mulch is also a good way to cut down weeds. I have it over every bed in my garden, even the ones that have weedmat on them, more for aesthetics on than weed suppression over the weedmat. There are a multitude of mulches available, from organic straws, barkchips, composted materials to inorganic stones and gravels. All have their advantages and downfalls, which is an article in itself.

Another rule for eliminating weeds is to get them before they seed. One plant can send out thousands of seeds, which is potentially thousands of weeds if you don?t get rid of them before they flower and set seed.

The only thing I can really offer here is get a low creeping grass such as Santa Ana couch. Pave where the lawn is or find someone else to do the mowing.

Alright, so maybe I have only taken you to gardening paradise, not gardening heaven. But hopefully I have helped you see the light.

She ran her first nursery at 25 while studying horticulture through the University of Melbourne. From there she moved on to work in three diverse nurseries in Melbourne and the country, two of which she managed. Jody also wrote a weekly gardening column for The Weekly Advertiser for five years while running a small local nursery in Horsham.

Currently Jody is teaching horticulture at the University of Ballarat, Horsham campus and is the resident Horticulturalist on ABC Western Victoria's Monday gardening program.

This article courtesy of http://www.quality-gardening.com.
You may freely reprint this article on your website or in
your newsletter provided this courtesy notice and the author
name and URL remain intact.