Homesteading

I think there's a lot of value if you can go outside in your garden every morning and just pull weeds for like five minutes. That makes a big, big difference if you just do small habits like that. I really like using weed hoes. You know, if we till up an area, like use the weed hoe to kind of knock down all the weeds in the walkways and around the plants. I find, you know, for a really large garden that's maybe three or four thousand square foot, that might take an hour or two and it's a really good workout. But if you do that about once a week, you can have a pretty manicured, beautiful looking garden without that many weeds, without having to use any, you know, pesticides or fungicides.

I've used plastic mulch to keep weeds down in our garden and it worked pretty good, but I don't know that I'm going to do it ever again because a lot of the plastic, when I was trying to take the plastic up at the end of the season, got stuck in the soil and it took like forever to pick up all the little pieces of plastic. Plus, I don't know if there's any microplastics that come from that plastic mulch sheet material. My preferred method of taking care of weeds is kind of unique. Instead of using wood mulch, I've used a lot of wood mulch around our fruit trees and so forth, but I really like river sand. River sand doesn't decompose, it's extremely heavy. That's, I guess, the benefit and the downside to it is that it's heavy to lug around with a wheelbarrow, but it can squash grass. Tall grass, you just put like six inches of river sand and it will squash just about anything. And then you can use a weed hoe and just cuts through the river sand really easily. Where I live in Missouri, we can get, I think it's about 10 tons, like 20,000 pounds of river sand for just under $300 to get delivered to our place. And that's a good amount of sand. You can mulch around a lot of things with that. But yeah, if you mulch with wood chips, it does break down and probably improve soil health over time. But it usually seems like most wood chips deteriorate after a season or two. It's nice with river sand, it doesn't really deteriorate. And because it's so big pieces of sand, like you can pour water on the plants if they need watering, and the river sand will kind of help it.