The weeding is just constant!

[newgarden722]

I had a gardener round last month for a one-off session to de-weed my garden - but about four weeks later the beds are full of them again! Is there anything I can do to try to suppress them, or is pulling them out one by one (and doing so regularly) the only way? I’ve planted some muehlenbeckia complexa to try and get some ground cover going, but it’s not going cover the whole of my bed any time soon...

You don't have to pull them out one by one if they are weeds that have germinated since you had a gardener in, hoeing them should be sufficient. It's better to have plants competing with each other rather than having space for weeds.

You could put weed suppressant membrane down and cover it with bark chippings. Or plant so closely that the little buggers have less space to come through.

Nothing like doing the weeding to leave some nice bare soil for - more weeds to grow! Depending on how big an area you are dealing wiht and how much space is between the plants, you could try a mulch such as chipped bark which hides the weed seeds in the soil from the light - which is what gets many of them going - and should also make those that do grow a bit easier to pull out.

Now my flower borders are few years old I ahrdly ahve to do any weeding as ther plants are cremmed in so close tehre is not room for wees to grow. I should get better, and a nice ground cover sounds like the way to go next, but while it's growing, bare soil is basically a weed nursery, as any veetable gardener will tell you.

Oh and just inc case you're not already aware - please don't use peat! It's not really a very good mulch anyway IMO (gets too dry), but you are probably aware of the environmental damage casued by digging it up to sell.

Large allotment here so lots of space for weeds to grow if we let them.

We use a mixture of hand weeding for the perennial weeds (dandelion, thistle and the like), hoeing for the annual weeds, mulch (woodchip) and dab on weedkiller for the awkward invaders like bindweed and marestail. Seems to be working as year by year the weeding burden goes down. However, if we were to leave it then it would soon all be as high as an elephant's eye again.