Organic gardening for beginners should start with native soil if you are lucky. Before you buy a property have the soil analyzed for long-term poisons such as DDT.
Jackie French says that is an insult, not a category. Weeds are mostly good for your garden. As Jackie says, it’s easier to have your organic garden looking like a jungle than looking like a desert, and jungles are more productive than deserts.
In an experiment with potatoes they divided fields into four treatments.
Conventional bare earth heaped up round the plants, weeds allowed to grow, lawn clippings, compost. The composted potatoes were best, but almost as good were those with weeds, followed by those with grass clippings, and last was the bare soil.
The only really bad weeds are grasses that spread with runners and give off chemicals to discourage the growth of other plants. So you have to exterminate Kikuyu grass and couch grass in Australia, but couch grass won’t take over in countries like the UK.
If you only have a couple of square yards infested with kikuyu or couch, water it well and cover it with heavy-duty clear polythene sheeting with the edges held down with bricks and covered with soil to prevent moisture escaping. The sun will cook the soil under the transparent plastic, but leave it there all summer to make sure that you have killed the runners of the grass.
If your proposed sustainable garden is widely infested with runner grasses you should forget about growing anything there the first year. Mow the weeds then cover them with overlapping layers of newspapers three or four sheets deep. Examine the cover every day and every time you see any green showing through, cover it with three sheets of newspaper with all the edges overlapped by a ring of three-sheets deep newspaper.
Even kikuyu needs some light to survive for a year. After six months you should no longer have any green appearing.
About the Author: Are you growing your own vegetables? Have you heared about organic gardening? Find out how to be healthy at naturalorganicgardening.com/
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