Weed Prevention 101

Here's a few quick tips about preventing those annoying weeds in your garden. I already told you how to get rid of them once they show up (tiller, hoe, or my favorite...pull them by hand) but how can you stop them from showing their ugly little faces in the first place? Here's one trick we use in our garden



We use black tarps made of this cloth/plastic material. You can find it at your local hardware store. It comes in a big roll. We lay it down around our squash plants and cut holes around the plants. It's a great way to stop the weeds from growing around the viney plants. This year we're also going to put it around our pumpkin and cantaloupe plants.

I've also heard that you can put wet newspaper down around your plants and it will prevent weeds while it slowly biodegrades. Has anyone tried this? I think it would be very time consuming for our larger garden but it might be a nice alternative for a smaller space.

Another question for my readers (if there are any!?!?)....what in the world is this?



We found three of them in our radish patch. They look like carrots on the bottom but the greens are different. I googled purple carrot, purple radish, white beets, and nothing matches. Any ideas?

Finally, another quote from my mom:
We were picking more peas last night (so many!!!) and in order to reach all of them you have to lean over the onions. Our onion stems/greens are already over a foot high, which means they're hard to ignore. As we are about to finish picking, my mom stops, looks up with a weird look on her face and says,
"I smell onion?"

I wonder why!!!!