How to recover beds that have been overgrown with established weeds

[thenewaveragebear1983]

I am not a gardener, I will admit to having been very lazy and my garden had been overgrown with weeds. We've spent today clearing and will probably do another 3-4 days graft before they are all gone, except obviously that will leave empty beds just waiting for the weeds to reappear. I'm ok with not planting until next year, but how can I prevent weeds regrowing?

Options that have been suggested are weed control matting, or even cardboard lay over to kill off the roots of the weeds? I'm not averse to a bit of digging but I'll be honest, it won't be my biggest priority so is unlikely to be as effective. The ground is hard, dry clay, very undernourished and neglected.

If I can find a solution to keep them at bay, I could do that at focus my attention on restoring small area at a time.

Please help me wise garden folk of mumsnet 🙏

This is what I was looking at today, 2 if these 3 areas now clear but the worst/biggest yet to do

No idea but following! We’ve tried and failed to do a wildflower border so it was low maintenance but honestly they’ve not even took despite regular water & sowing. Need ideas to make it look neat and tidy for early spring when I hope to but the house on the market but it’s been an unloved overgrown beasts with the neighbouring bushes growing through the fence 😂

You can't stop weeds. It's what they do.

What you can do though, once an area is cleared, is to go out and pull up tiny weeds as soon as they come up. Little and often is the way to do it. The trouble with clearing an area and digging it over is that all the millions of dormant seeds in the ground waiting for the right conditions will suddenly burst into life. Give them six weeks and you have another mammoth task on your hands. So keep on top of them, and eventually they will all have germinated and things will calm down. That is the stage you can then start putting in some spreading ground-cover plants, and covering the rest of the soil with a thick layer of bark chips on top of cardboard.

@invisiblecat the problem is these are not little weeds, these are big chunky well established monsters in really hard soil, they just break and the roots are left.

I think I might have to literally dig out the top layer of the soil? As in, not turn it over and weed it out, but dig it out and get rid of it. We plan to buy big shrubs next season to fill the space but I am concerned that by then the weeds will all be back.

There are actually a few plants in there somewhere...... I think! And a Christmas tree in a pot 🤣

The only guarantee in gardening is weeds. You just have to keep on top of them. So weed little and often. And best the day after a rainstorm.

Wildflower patches are not low maintenance.

It takes years to establish one.

Your answer is compost!

You need some well rotted manure or garden compost.

Spread it onto the cleared soil 3-4 inches thick and it will form a mulch stopping the light getting to a lot of the weeds and improve the soil quality.

After 2-3 weeks start planting some perennial shrubs and flowers that will come up again next year. Big drifts or clumps of the same plant work best - three of each type or more.

In the meantime buy a hoe. Then on a dry day just hoe off the top of any weeds that start to appear, or pull/dig out bigger ones until the plants get established.

The suggestions in your OP- weed membrane or several (overlapping) layers of cardboard until spring will do the job! Google charles dowding and no dig gardening. You'll still have to weed (mostly hoeing off annual weeds) next year but little and often rather than the huge job (removing perennial weeda) you've just done!

We had a really difficult to access bed full of weeds when we moved in to our house, we kind of ignored them for the first couple of years so they did get very well established. In the end we strimmed them all and put thick black plastic weed membrane down and left alone for over a year. Everything died off and we now have plenty of nice ground cover plants in. If your soil is bad, I'd do a couple of layers of wet cardboard then a thick layer of compost over the top. Let the worms do the digging for you.

These are all excellent suggestions, thank you! The ground looks so parched and dry I can't see how anything Will grow so it is giving me great hope!

We inherited really weeds beds - we did the layers of cardboard covered with a thick mulch and it was pretty effective. Depending how you feel about weedkiller, if anything does come up through you could carefully paint the new leaves so nothing else gets touched.

A suggestion for days you have chosen to do some weeding in your rock hard soil, go out the night before with the hose and give it a good soak. The next morning the ground will have softened up and you will be able to easily pull weeds.

Lat down black plastic with mulch on top. Leave it on long enough to kill the roots. Then remove it when you are ready to plant. Then when you are done planting, mulch all around the plants well, at least two inches of mulch. It doesn't prevent all weed growth but it slows it down.
It's more labour intensive initially, but some people use landscape fabric and cut holes for each plant, then just use mulch or something else everywhere else (meaning no soil on top of fabric, just mulch or some kind of decorative gravel/small stones). Just make sure the holes are big enough for the soil around the plant to receive fertilizer, so make the holes bigger than the
plants are. Weeds will still sprout from the holes, but it will be a lot easier than weeding the entire bed.

I would do the cardboard/compost thing too. You should have someone local who can deliver a dumpy bag of compost which works out much cheaper, then you can layer it up good and thick. It will be way cheaper than bags from the garden centre.

This may be a really stupid question, but does the compost not feed the weeds???

The layer of cardboard forms a barrier so the compost is not feeding the weeds.

The compost stops light getting to the weeds so many of them die. The deep rooted ones will force their way through but as you keep cutting their heads off they will weaken and can eventually be dug out- a process made far easier by the improvement to the soil due to the compost and the wonderful worms

Aldi is doing tarpaulins soon if that may be an option to put under mulch if you don't have a lot of cardboard?

Not sure it would help the water dissipate when it rains right enough as tarps are waterproof obv!

No dig gardening is the way to go, OP. Much easier, and better for the soil structure. Not to get too garden-nerdy, but the soil would be in pretty good shape to grow big weeds, so you don't want to disturb the structure of it if you can avoid it. Adding cardboard and mulch/compost will kill off weeds whilst keeping the soil intact.

I've recently moved into a house with a large overgrown garden, so have been learning how to best tackle it without breaking my back!