What shall I do about my garden this year?

[DoinItForTheKids]

Hi

Haven't posted in Gardening before so I thought, well, why not eh?!

Not Summer 2017 but in Summer 2016 my garden was lovely. Lovely in light of all the beautiful perennials popping up all over the place and looking fab. It's not landscaped in any way and is pretty higgledy-piggledy but it looked lovely.

However last summer the bark chippings that had been down for a few years had finally disintegrated. As we know they don't do a busting lot for stopping weeds anyway but with them completely gone, lots of weed seeds blew in and started to sprout. And herein lies my problem.

I went and bought weed killer so I could have several sessions on the weeds when they were at their small stage of life. But every time I went out there was either a breeze so not doable, or, rain was forecast and that would be then pointless to weed kill as it needs a good 24 hours to sit on the plants in order to kill them.

By the end of the summer I had literally a garden full of tall weeds so much so that you couldn't even see many of my lovely perennials flowering away.

The same thing is going to happen this year, but much, much worse. There are WAY too many weeds to pull and in fact earlier in last year my DD (for money) weeded some large sections but that wasn't enough to stem the rising tide. What can I do? All I can think of is either:

1. Doing nothing (again) and it will look bloody awful
   
2. Buy a strimmer and strim the weeds because clearly spraying is too difficult to do.
   

Help!

I have actually been gardening for years and absolutely love it but my weed situation has beaten me at the moment.

What I'd LIKE to do is have it basically landscaped, laid with artificial turf and then it would be manageable with regard to weeds. But I've not got enough money for any of that, sadly.

I need ideas and thoughts as I'm very unsure how to proceed...

[buckeejit]

How big an area is it? Is there any lawn?

There are options - you could add in some ground cover or turn the soil and sow some wildflower seeds - we did this quite successfully in a small area last year and it was lovely

[DoinItForTheKids]

Hmm. It's not a huge garden. The plants are down both sides, but it's the whole area in the middle. There's nothing laid to lawn or anything but if I grow wildflowers I literally won't be able to traverse the garden at all (or get to the shed at the end !).

I could bark it again but I'm afraid it might be a total waste of money if the weeds are going to come up through it.

[MaudAndOtherPoems]

Would it be feasible to cover the weedy areas in black plastic, to choke them without resorting to chemical warfare? If necessary, you could first rescue the perennials and put them in pots.