It’s January 1, which means we can officially dig into the seed catalogues that have been arriving in the mail.
This year I have a new bed to allocate to something interesting. We already have vegetable and herb beds that yield all the produce we can process, and I have perennial beds out the wazoo. So, I think I’d really like to make this new one into a cutting bed, and grow flowers from seed in it.
This thread isn’t about how you think I ought to buy bedding plants instead, okay? They’re prohibitively expensive for us and I want to grow flowers from seed.
Okay. So given that I want to seed flowers, I can’t mulch the bed or bury a weed barrier, so how do I stop the flower garden from becoming a tangled weed-ridden mess? There must be a way to do this, I just don’t know how. Please tell me.
I guess it has something to do with planting flowers in rows and hoeing between the rows, just like the veg beds?
There are a few thing you can do, none of which provide 100% weed control but all will help. One method is to buy LOTS of seed and broadcast seed the area so thickly that the flowers crowd out most of the weeds. Another method, if you have lots of time, is to spend a year “cleaning” the area to be planted. Use hand cultivation, herbicide or mulching to remove all weeds from the area to be planted for a year prior to planting flowers. This will sprout and/or remove most existing weeds and prevent dropping any new weed seeds. A black plastic mulch over the entire bed works pretty well. The summer heat trapped under the plastic will cook most of the weed seeds or sprouts in the soil and will partially sterilize the area for the next year’s planting.
Once the flowers and weeds are growing, there is no sure-fire way to maintain weed control other than hoeing and hand removal. There are no selective herbicides that kill all weeds and leave flowers*. There* are* however, certain grass killers that can be oversprayed…they will kill out weed grasses and leave broad-leaf flowers alone.
If you’re willing to use chemical weed control, the glyphosphate herbicides such as Roundup are very useful. If the flowers are in rows, a low-pressure, carefully-directed spray from a backpack or garden sprayer can be used between rows and around the edges. A small amount of overspray or splatter will not harm the flowers, especially if they are large mature plants…a plant has to be pretty well saturated for glyphosphate to kill it. If weeds are overtopping the flowers, a wick applicator can be useful.
Best-practices weed control usually involve a combination of several methods.
*There was one developed a few years ago…mainly for use by public works agencies that planted wildflowers along roadways. Unfortunately it proved to be very damaging to peripheral farm and garden crops and its use was withdrawn.
SS
Do you have space to start the seeds off in pots, then not plant them out until they reach a decent size? That’s what I almost always do with seed grown flowers, you can treat them just the same as shop-bought plants then, and add mulch or whatever you normally do.
Tiny mixed seedlings are a pain to hoe, you can’t tell what’s what easily enough.
That is about what I was going to suggest. In about 3 months I am popping my master gardener kit into one of my aerogardens and using it to start some spiffy flowers I got for a special black and gold garden [the flowers are all ‘black’ or gold]
Starting the seedlings indoors in pots and then transplanting them does help quite a bit. If your seedlings are big and vigorous enough, you can mulch around them after you transplant them, and that will keep the weeds down a bit. But starting the seedlings indoors is a bit pricey if you buy the pre-made peat pellets or even the peat pots. You need a pretty good germination rate to beat buying bedding plants. I have good years and bad years – on bad years, I’ll forget to water (or I’ll over water) and half of the seedlings will perish in a weekend.
Or you can go the wildflower route – just put down a whole lot of seeds and hope for the best.
I’ve done this successfully a few times. I think what helped was that I planted plots of the same seed – I didn’t mix them up. That made it easier for me to identify what was a weed and what wasn’t, when the stuff started to come up. If the shoots all look the same, it helps.
Have you seen the black petunias? There are black petunias this year, which I haven’t seen before. Plain black, and black with purple stripes, and black with yellow stripes. Weeeiiirrddd.
Thanks for the “start in trays indoors” suggestion. That’s the obvious solution, of course, and I’m going to do it. I have a perfect window, even.
I ordered my seeds this morning. Two varieties of giant snapdragon, three of poppies, three of zinnias (including the queen red lime, ooooooh), and one nigella.
I plant both my vegetable garden and my front garden from seeds, around the hostas and clematis that come up each year. I definitely recommend starting them early inside. You don’t need fancy potting equipment either. I use cardboard egg cartons and potting soil and set the cartons on old cookie sheets. Cover them loosely with saran wrap to keep them moist and warm until the shoots get established. When you move them to the bed you just need to moisten the cardboard thoroughly and it’ll practically fall apart. Then mulch around them as you would with pre-grown store-bought stuff, leaving a couple inches clear around the base to allow for more growth.
I always plant about 1/2 again as many seedlings as I can use because you’re bound to lose a few in the early growing process, and it lets you pick and choose, transplanting the stronger, more stable plants.
A personal favorite, the Black Hollyhock
A hardy annual in most climates, but they’ll grow almost anywhere and once established are very good about reseeding themselves year after year.
SS
A wick applicator is a very simple ingenious device. Basically it’s just a big sponge with a reservoir attached to keep it soaked with herbicide…you wipe it over the weed, applying a small but highly concentrated amount of chemical. If weeds are a few inches above the tops of the flowers, you swipe it carefully over the tips of the weeds killing them without touching the flowers. Unlike a spray application which of course goes everywhere.
Wick applicators are meant to be used only with the glyphosate* herbicides which have the advantage of being non-selective, non-volatile, and non-residual. In a sprayer, they are generally mixed with water in a 2% - 5% mix. With a wick applicator you are applying only a tiny amount so the concentration must be much higher…generally 30% - 50%. They can be used to get up close to flowers or garden crops without worrying about the possibility of spray drift.
*Glyphosate is the correct spelling. I apologize for misspelling it in the previous post.
SS
Ugh…Canadian Thistle, along with its obnoxious big cousin the Bull Thistle, which is more common where I live, is one of the most damnably difficult weeds to eradicate. Mow them down and they grow right back within days. You can kill them by cutting them off below the root crown, but the root is so tough & fiberous you practically need a chainsaw to cut through it. And they have some kind of waxy coating on the leaves that inhibits uptake of herbicides. That said, a strong enough dose of* Roundup®* (the best-known of the glyphosate class) will kill just about anything, but in the case of thistle you have to really soak them with the stuff. If you use too low a dose, it will burn them a little but they’ll grow out of it. With repeated applications of a non-lethat amount they seem to develope a semi-immunity.
Thistles respond well to 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) but use of this one can carry some risk to the person using it and, because it volatizes readily, can be vary damaging to nearby desirable crops; especially grapes and fruit trees. It can however be sprayed over lawns and sod crops, because it acts only on broadleaf plants and is harmless to monocots (grasses)
That pic of the Bull Thistle just makes my skin crawl.
You’re right about the persistence of the dreaded thistle. I complete destroyed my flower garden a few years ago in an effort to eradicate it and I still have some.
Does 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid have a brand name? I’m not sure what to look for at the garden center.
2,4-D is one of the older herbicides; it’s been off-patent for years so lots of different companies make it under lots of brand names. Navigate, Weed-pro and Justice are three that come to mind, but there are a lot of others. Most of the garden-variety “weed-n-feed” lawn-care products contain 2,4-D but that’s probably not what ou want. If you just ask for 2,4-D amine, a good garden store operator will know what you’re talking about. The amine formulation is the one you want…there are other formulations, including the popular esters but they are high-potency - volatile and somewhat risky and usually require an applicator’s license to purchase. Amines are fairly safe, but if you’re not used to using them be sure to follow the label directions and take proper precautions.
If you’re able to spot-spray the thistles, some people like to use a double-whammy mix of glysophate and 2,4-D. Generally, you’d want to use about 1/2 as much 2,4-D as glysophate or, in a typical garden sprayer, 1/2 cup glysophate and 1/4 cup 2,4-D in 2 gallons of water would make roughly a 3% glysophate/1.5% 2,4-D solution which is about right for most spot-spraying. This is general information, not specific recommendations…when in doubt, follow the label directions.*
One further word of caution…If you use 2,4-D in a sprayer, it’s best to reserve that sprayer for herbicide use. If you use it to spray weeds then later mix up a batch of insecticide and spray your apple trees for worms, the herbicide residue in the sprayer may damage the tree. I’ve seen this happen even when proper rinsing proceedures were followed. Better to be safe and buy a separate sprayer for insecticides.
FWIW, I found a useful page on thistle controlhere
SS
all of which may be more than you ever wanted to know about the subject:)
Oh no, this thistle has been the bane of my existence for the past 4 years so I’m ready to learn all I can about its eradication. Good advice about the separate sprayer. I made that mistake once with Triox followed by RoundUp. Lost a blue spruce over that little number.
Thanks for the link, SS. I’ve bookmarked the thread so I can get right on this at the first sign of spring.
