Video 1 Transcript
Okay, so here are some of my tips from the last several years of gardening every year, basically. So, number one, I've used black plastic mulch as a weed barrier and that actually worked pretty well, but I wouldn't do it again because it was really a pain to get the plastic. Like, some of it got, you know, covered by mud and dirt and got left in the soil and it took a long time to clean up a lot of places of black plastic. So, I don't really like doing that. We also don't want microplastics in the soil. Weed hoes are amazing. I love weed hoes. In fact, I've had beautiful gardens. We'll till them up, plant the plants immediately after tilling, right before a good rain, and then, you know, maybe once a week just go out and start weed hoeing around the plants and the walkways. If you do that about once a week, it keeps the weeds at bay. It's a great exercise, by the way, but that's been a good method to take care of weeds for me. Another tip is I would recommend having pretty wide rows in between your garden plants. That's my preference. Each year I tend to have wider and wider rows because, you know, a lot of these plants grow really big, especially like squash plants and, you know, tomato and cucumber plants and cantaloupe plants and watermelon plants. They really spread a lot if you give them the space and it just feels easier to manage the weeds and walk around the plants if you have wider rows.
Video 2 Transcript
If you're going to buy some sort of animal manure to, you know, till into your garden area, just be aware that a lot of animal manure has a lot of seeds. So I've got, you know, a big dump load of, you know, horse bedding manure, compost, whatever, and we tilled it into our garden. But that area, you know, when it got a few good rains, it just had tons of grass come up from that area. So just be aware of grass seeds and manures that you use. Also, one thing that I learned from my neighbor, who's a master gardener, who has beautiful gardens, he does the till between the rows method, and then just pull weeds around the plants. And he suggested that I till about an inch of river sand, not beach sand, because you don't want it to be salty at all. But river sand is more coarse, and you can kind of till it into the soil in places that have really dense soil, like a lot of Missouri where it's kind of like clay-like. That helps with drainage, makes it easier to weed as well. The river sand also breaks up the soil, which I believe makes it easier for roots to penetrate the soil and spread, and also easier to water for the water to penetrate the soil if it's really dry. I think the only downside of having river sand is, you know, it's not nutritive, doesn't have, you know, the nutrients that you would have in soil. But I think the main downside of having a lot of river sand is just that plants like corn that are more prone to tipping over in high winds might tip over a little bit more easily if there's a bunch of sand or, you know, some sand in your soil. You don't want to do too much sand, but I found it to be pretty nice to mix in some river sand into...
