I see that home center sells some chemical weed killers that are supposed to be used in a flower garden. Are they good? Can I safely use those chemicals around plants that I have planted in the garden? I don't hear much about this type of product. Seem like I hear mostly about similar products that we use in lawn, but not in a garden.
I would like to find a way to keep weeds out of my flower garden in order to reduce the never ending task of pulling weeds out from the garden.
Thanks.
Jay Chan
---------------------------------------------------------- The following is the reason why I want to use weeds killer instead of mulch. This is not directly related to this post. But I mention the reason here just in case someone wonders why I don't use mulch.
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I know I could have put mulch to suppress weeds and to ease the task of pulling out weeds. In the first year after I put mulch in the flower garden, I found that the mulch really helped me to reduce weeds in my flower garden. But a couple years later, the mulch is pretty much rotted and decomposed to be similar to soil. This means it no longer functions as mulch.
If I keep adding mulch, I will do more harm than good. The reason is that the flower garden is a rised bed around the house foundation. There is only 8" clearance between the mulch and the wooden structure of my house. I am afraid that putting more mulch will reduce the clearance to a point that I will invite termites into my house. Actually, I may decide to remove the existing mulch from around the foundation garden just to increase the clearance between the wooden structure from the soil.
And I really don't like to use inorganic mulch (such as stones) in areas where I will be actively doing planting every year.
I guess the other alternative is to replace the existing mulch with new mulch, and do this every two years or so. This sounds like a lot of work though; I probably prefer hand pulling weeds than replacing the mulch.