Veggie Garden Weeds

Why You Should Weed The Vegetable Garden

When you first plant your new vegetable garden, it almost looks bare. The vegetable plants may be tiny still, or not even sprouted yet, and since you recently turned the soil and made the planting rows, there are also no weeds growing either.

For some people, just the fact that weeds create green in their garden is enough for them to allow the weeds to continue growing. Some weeds are even beautiful in their own rights too, and many gardeners are hard pressed to pull something out that looks pretty.

When you're growing vegetables in a garden though, particularly if you're growing the vegetables organically, letting weeds grow can create a large variety of problems.

The first problems weeds will create for you is watering. Since most weeds consume large amounts of water, they'll often steal the water from your vegetables, and this will stunt the growth of your vegetable plants and sometimes even make them not bear anything for harvesting as well.

Another big problem weeds create in a vegetable garden is nutrients. Like the water, weeds will steal essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals from the soil that your vegetables need to grow healthy and strong. And if the weeds are stealing it all, there may not be enough left for your vegetables to grow well, if at all.

Last but not least, weeds also create massive pest control problems. When weeds crop up in the vegetable garden - especially if there are lots of them growing - they will attract a wide variety of pests and bugs into your vegetable garden. And those bugs and pests will start munching happily away on the stalks, leaves, and stems of your vegetable plants. Some of them will even start eating into the growing vegetables themselves, ruining them for your family's eating enjoyment.

Now, the reasons above are the exact reasons you create a vegetable garden with rows of mounded soil.

By creating mounds of soil which the vegetables grow on, you're able to let the water reach their roots much faster. Because when you start watering your vegetable garden, the water will naturally flow into and fill up the lower lying areas first. If you watch this process while watering your garden, you'll see that the water starts seeping into the mounded soil at the sides, underneath the top of your vegetable plants. In other words: Where the roots are.

The other benefit of planting your vegetables in rows of this sort though, is easy weed control. If you space your vegetable growing mounds far enough apart, you're able to walk through every few days with a simple garden hoe, and scrape out any weeds which might be starting to crop up in the lower lying areas.

This makes weeding the vegetable garden a fairly quick and simple process, as long as you make sure to pull or hoe the weeds regularly. Once a week minimum, but if you have a few minutes, do a quick pass with your hoe a few times each week to keep the weeds from invading your garden.