Which would take the least total work, pulling weeds or hoeing? I know that if you can pull a weed up roots and all it can not grow back. If you just cut it off an inch or two below the ground with a hoe it can grow back but hoeing is much easier.
What is you opinion? Thank you in advance for all replies.
-- Whenever I hear or think of the song "Great green gobs of greasy grimey gopher guts" I imagine my cat saying; "That sounds REALLY, REALLY good. I'll have some of that!"
As a fan of neither but practitioner of both, I can say that in clay soil none of the above works for me! When it would be the best time to hoe (ie, when you are doing more cultivation than hoing small, eensy teensy weeds) the ground is too wet to work or dry/tough as a parking lot. As in no way would a tiller or a hoe work at all. Raised beds, yada yada. It's being amended for several years now with all the right organic stuff, just swallows it down and seems to not make much difference in soil quality. Peat, leaves, straw and grass clippings in vast quantities, and seasonal application of aged manure, sand and sand and sand.
And the reverse is also true, when the ground has dried to the point it can be worked with a hoe, the weeds have a good head start on me. My window seems to be quite small where the ground may be worked, and often I'm not prepared to do the work at the most propitious time.
This year I am taking a stand with a grub hoe - adze or mattock - that weighs in at 8-12 pounds and plan to clobber the weedy patch - er, garden - before the things are 8 foot tall again. I have started layering in bales and bales of straw. My short potato row took 1.5 bales of straw, but it looks promising - the only weeds left are the ones poking up on the edges, not around the potato plants. They are somewhat easy to pull, as that soil was amended with 6-8 inches of wood chips several years ago and they have turned into a delightful almost-soil mixture. If the straw lasts longer than the season I will try to till it in and get more straw next season. $7/bale but the bales are larger than "normal". I don't know exactly what that means, but my experience prior to this was the smaller bales, and 7 would be too high a figure for those. The ones I mention are at least 1.5 times the size of those small regular bales.
The corn was a different tale, as I layered in some bags of leaves I conned - er, received from a friend. I think these were kinda acidic in quantity, as the seedlings have not done much at all for 2.5 weeks now. They might be past the crucial stage as they are beginning to turn from a sickly yellow to a nice dark green. They have been mulched with a layer or 3 of newspaper, followed by a layer of leaves, topped with 3-5 inches of straw. Weeds are coming up through that like it's hard to believe - wisps of grass and creeping charlie and ragweed. Not supposed to, but there you are.
I think back to the days of my misspent youth when the garden at the old home was really nice and friable and could be worked with a hoe - that was good soil, and I was too young to appreciate it.
Definately takes longer and more effort IMO pulling the weeds by hand one handful or plant at a time than it takes hoeing.
If possible, do it while the soil is moist. Stay on top of the weed population, and hand method is fine.
Daniel Prince wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
I find the hoe works best with little weeds, but it merely breaks off the upper growth. For things like grass, you'll probably have to pull it out (or trowel it out.)
Our garden got away from us, so there's been grass and other weeds growing like crazy. My weeding tool of choice this time: Lawn mower. (Next will come the tiller, and a second planting of beans and peas.) I've also been using a scickle (that may be spelled wrong... I think it's right, but it looks wrong) to take out the grass and leave the tomatos. These are more extreme "taking back the garden" measures, though... keep on top of your weeding some how and you won't need to do this!
Puckdropper
PS: Your signature indication is improperly formed. There should be a space after the two dashes.
I use ours on wide expanses or long stretches. My favourite is the stirrup hoe because, kept sharp, it just sails beneath the soil. I use a Japanese gardener's knife for close in work as well as digging and rooting out weeds.
My wife won a set of short, stainless, hand hoes and she's almost never without one in the garden.
The way I figure it, If you keep after the weeds with a hoe, you can disturb the disturbable, encourage dormant seeds for the next hoeing, starve the perennial weeds and take off swaths of short weeds before they can set seed.
A hoe in wet clay is a nearly useless tool.
This approach worked wonders on my clay soil. You should be able to incorporate it in to the soil for a couple of years and then go no-till. Very odd.
Depends on the weed and the root length. They vary. And it depends on how mature you let the weed get.
Steve
I have a collinear hoe that I like a lot. It makes it easy to get in close.
Andy comments:
All of the responses I have read have merit, but none of them are considering the most important item:
It takes TWO HANDS to work a hoe.
If you pull the weeds with your right hand, you can still hold the beer in your left....
Ya just gotta look at the BIG picture....
Andy in Eureka, Texas
Another vote for that.
Our garden has done really well WRT weeds this year. Partly, that may just be from many years of struggle. Or luck. But, what I did differently this time is to dig narrow trenches in the (fairly clayey) soil, and fill them with peat/manure/dirt. This is where I put the seeds. Then, I watered by hand (it takes a long time), ONLY where I have seeds. Water is power.
I also walk freely between the rows, which leaves that soil fairly compacted. And, I had to work down them with my (stirrup) hoe, maybe 4 or 5 times. Way better than other years, though.
George
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