>Next: Cultivating a Garden
Preventing Weeds
Cultivating is a care practice that keeps a vegetable garden’s soil loose to quickly absorb applied water and cuts off and kills young weeds that compete with plants for food and moisture. In this section you’ll find both the methods to use and their companion, applying mulch, including:
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- Why cultivating is a useful and necessary practice in vegetable gardens.
- Explanation of the simple cultivating process.
- Cultivating tools required for both in-ground and container vegetable plants.
- How deep to cultivate around vegetable plants.
- Preventing weeds from growing in your vegetable garden.
Landscape Fabric and Weed Prevention
Proper soil preparation, followed by mulching, will do much to control weeds in your vegetable garden.
Mulches and point-irrigation with drip systems or soaker hoses also helps prevent weed seeds from sprouting.
Also plan to cultivate your soil at regular intervals during the season.
Controlling Established Weeds
Once established, weeds are deep-rooted and challenging to eradicate. It’s best to uproot them by cultivating while they are young or pull the sprouts as they appear. Always avoid allowing weeds growing near your vegetable garden to go to seed, as their offspring can be troublesome in the following season.
Maintaining Good Garden Soil
Cultivating
In addition to uprooting young weeds before they become established, cultivating—working the surface layer of soil with a cultivating tool, hoe, or rake—prevents a hard crust from forming on the topsoil’s surface. Loosening the soil and breaking up that crust helps precipitation or irrigation water to penetrate the soil rather than run off.
Working the soil also breaks up clods and allows air to penetrate down to the root zone, and it helps carry to the roots some nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium that tend to bind to minerals in the soil.
Remember when cultivating that the intent is to work the top 4 in. (10 cm) of soil, avoiding deeper soil penetration that might harm your vegetable plants’ roots. Also keep your cultivating tool 3–4 in. (75–100 mm) away from the point where your vegetable plants’ stems rise from the ground.
An important side benefit of cultivating is the uprooting of young weed plants before they can become established. All garden soil contains some weed seed. When you turn the soil to prepare it for planting, you also bring this seed to the surface, where it germinates in the ideal moisture and light conditions of your vegetable garden.