weed cover

what is the best stuff to put on the ground to cover small weeds..have dug the roots out from the big ones but the small ones are all over the place...please help

 

i have plants already planted but these weeds are taking over..so do you think batk chippings will do the trick as I dont want ground covering plants as i put bedding plants in in the summer time...but these weeds are very tiny but spreading all over the place..

 

I would just use a hoe. if they are tiny then it takes no time at all. Just pick a day when it is drying, perhaps when there is a drying breeze and they will die off as they dry out. If you put bedding plants in later then you are going to lose a fair amount of bark as you plant the bedding.

 

Are thes little ones the type which don't have any tap-roots, Duckyjuk? If so, you can safely hoe them then mulch with bark, so long as they haven't gone to seed. If they have tap roots, and are just showing as small weeds on the surface (I'm thinking of ground elder here), then you'll need to do some serious digging to get them right out before you mulch, or it will be a waste of time.

This is what ground elder looks like, t give you an idea...

http://www.crocus.co.uk/pestscards/?comboID=90

The colour is a much lighter, lime-green in the new leaves, btw.....

 

I agree with geoff. Not just hoeing, but continuous hoeing. I created some border areas about 4 years ago, which had nothing planted in them whilst I was growing a load of plants from seed. I just hoed every few days whilst it was fallow. After a while nothing at all grew. And even today I almost never get any weeds. I get seedlings from my own plants that I have to remove, but almost no weed weeds!

 

I think one of the ideas of continuous hoeing, well frequent hoeing anyway, is that apart from killing the weeds you cut through it gradually exhausts the store of weed seed in the surface layers.