When I wrote my original article on cultural techniques for controlling weeds, I mentioned the stale seed bed technique but at that time I considered it was more appropriate to broad scale agriculture rather than the smaller space urban and suburban productive gardens. I have since found that it can be of use, although I did find that out by accident. I decided that it would be worth providing more detail so you can include it, if you want, in your arsenal of weed control strategies.
So, what is the stale seed bed weed control technique?
It is a relatively simple technique that involves four steps –
- Prepare the veggie seed bed including any cultivation to ensure a fine tilth,
- Irrigate to encourage weeds stimulated by the tillage to germinate and emerge from the soil,
- Once the weeds have emerged, kill them off with the minimum or soil disturbance,
- Sow or transplant your target crop.
I turned over a raised bed in the back yard in preparation for sowing my yearly carrot crop. I then sowed the seed, applied pressure to the soil in the seeded area to maximise soil/seed contact, watered and then covered the seeds with hessian to maintain moist seed bed. This is how I do it every year.
What I had not considered was that the bed had been fallow, except for a few weeds which I had dutifully pulled out before turning the soil. This had allowed an accumulation of weed seeds.
I periodically checked under the hessian and once some seeds had sprouted I removed it to allow the seedlings access to sunlight. Job done, sort of!
After a few days I inspected my carrot bed and found that indeed, carrots seeds had germinated….. about half a dozen of them. The vast majority of seedlings had leaves that were not the right shape and obviously weeds of some description and not carrots. At this point I decided to use the stale seed bed technique and see how it worked.
I irrigated the bed to make sure the soil was moist, intending to solarise it to kill the weeds without disturbing the soil, but found I didn’t have the required plastic sheeting. I am sure they would use glyphosate or similar in mainstream agriculture but that was obviously a non-starter for me. In the end I used my flame weeder, running it quickly over the surface of the bed. An inspection the next day confirmed that the seedlings had indeed all passed.
I then re-sowed carrot seed, applied a thin layer of fine grained cocopeat over the surface, and then poured a watering can full of water over it and replaced the hessian bags. It will be interesting to see what germination will occur!
While not perfect, this technique enabled me to keep the weeds at bay long enough to let the tender carrot seedlings get a leg up. It is a useful technique when combined with other weed control practices.
