The ambiance of your Italian culinary herbs or of those carefully nurtured medicinal herbs can become completely lost if weeds are allowed to get out of control. It has been estimated that at any one time there can be as many as 100,000 seeds in any square yard patch of earth. On that basis it is not surprising that weeding your herb garden is going to be a constant process.
Dealing with weeds in the herb garden, or indeed any vegetable or flower garden can be a real and constant chore. Midsummer is definitely the season when weeds are at their most prolific but with a willingness to deal with them, weeds can be beaten.
When you are first preparing your herb bed, do it early so that you can leave it for about two weeks before planting your herbs. By doing so you will see all the fast growing weeds from seeds that have germinated in the good growing conditions that your preparations has given them. Gently hoe them out without disturbing the surface too much. Then your planting will at least have a weed free start.
As your herb growing season begins you have all the work of preparing the bed, planting out cuttings or seedlings then hopefully standing back to enjoy the sight of all your Italian culinary herbs coming to maturity. Unfortunately other little plants will soon start to appear as well, and if you had sown seed how do you know what is a weed and what is a treasured herb?
What then is a Weed? Weeds could be defined several ways, but simple knowledge dictates that a weed is just any plant that grows where it was not planted or where it is not wanted. Regular weeding is absolutely necessary so just accept the fact that you will have to spend quite a lot of time doing it in order to have the best results from your culinary herbs.
Why is it so important? Apart from the unpleasant look of some weeds and of course the untidiness of them it is important for several reasons:
1.) Weeds take out nutrients from the soil that your herbs need.
2.) Weeds with their more vigorous growth will crowd and smother the herbs
3.) Weeds will rob your herbs of the available moisture in the soil.
4.) Weeds will grow taller than the herbs and rob them of sunshine.
5.) Weeds will provide a home for all sorts of garden pests.
Getting rid of annual and perennial weeds is a constant battle. But it can be done by the tedious process of pulling the taller ones regularly before they can set seed. Careful use of a hoe to grub out or to cut the stems just below the ground always avoiding any disturbance to the herb plants is by far the easiest method. Constant treatment year on year should reduce the weed problem, but it will never completely eradicate it.
By: John Beaver
© 2010 Culinary Arts Education
