We called a farmer friend and begged his advice. “Dowse everything heavily in herbicide. Wait a week for it to die and then you can break it up and it will be ready to plant. I also use herbicide at this time of year, that time of year, on these crops and those…”
I wasn’t OK with that.
I sat, criss-cross-applesauce in my yard and stared at that spot. I live in a place where rich black dirt is everywhere you turn. It’s a drained swamp that was once covered with glaciers. Things grow here. Everything grows here. Toss an apple core in the bushes and a tree will sprout. I’m not kidding. That has happened to us. This isn’t like our yard in Arizona where anything that wasn’t a prickly pear cactus had to be nursed along like a 90 year old heart attack patient. The trick wasn’t getting the garden to grow. The trick was to get everything else to STOP growing in that spot. There had to be a better way than spraying poison on the ground where I wanted to work barefoot and grow my family’s food.
I asked myself, “What’s making the current life grow?”
Easy. It had rich soil, sunlight, water and air.
What if I could deprive it of one or more of those things? Hmmm…
A plan was hatched.
I grabbed a shovel and turned all of the sod by hand. This may be the single most physically difficult task I’ve ever undertaken. Then again… this is coming from a woman who gets tired carrying the laundry basket from one room to another when it’s full. I’m not exactly an olympic athlete. The work made my hands blister and bleed. I whined a lot about my poor, sore hands. Mostly because I was kind of proud that I’d communed with my inner pioneer woman and I wanted everyone to know.
I got my fingers in the dirt and broke up the big clods working the largest weeds – dandelions mostly – out roots and all and tossing them into my compost bin.
When everything was more or less dirt-side up I got the garden hose and turned the whole space into a muddy slosh pit and then I covered it with thick plastic and weighed down the edges. I left it, baking in the sun like that for one week. No oxygen. No light. Way too much heat.
At the end of the week, I pulled the plastic off, broke everything up again with my trusty spade (a significantly easier task the second time around) and picked out any remaining weeds. There were only a very few survivors.
I planted the space and it thrived beautifully. A few weeds came through as summer wore on but I’m reasonably sure that would have happened no matter what.
Some crazy big tomato plants from last year’s garden. I now know why they say to leave a good deal of space between those tiny seedlings!
Is this the approved method used by experienced gardeners everywhere? Nope.
Will it work on every type of soil? I honestly have no idea.
Is it better to start in the fall and get everything ready ahead of time? Absolutely. I have no doubt what-so-ever that you get better results that way with much less back-breaking work.
Is all lost if you decided this spring, as these first warm days peeked out from behind the gray clouds, that you want to start a garden? No way! Get out there and look at your space. REALLY look at it and I bet you will see a way to make your garden grow… no nasty chemicals required.
Are you, too, seeking to save the earth, promote world peace and raise productive citizens without expending too much effort?
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