My three-year-old daughter Amalie and I planted 799 cloves of garlic in a new garlic bed. Seeing weeds popping up just a few days later, I had the bright idea to cover the bed with plastic. I had a few 50′ lengths of of plastic that I had used as mulch for my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants last year (the ones the deer ate), so I spread those on top of the garlic bed. The plastic was full of holes I cut in it for the transplants, but I overlapped the pieces and figured it’d be good enough to kill some weeds. We weighed it down with rocks I had unearthed from the plot itself.
Then I started thinking about a YouTube video I had watched about “solarizing” the soil as a weed control method. Basically, they cover the plot with a thin, clear plastic to heat up the soil enough to pasteurize it, killing any weed seeds. The thing is, you’re supposed to do this before planting. I worried that if things got too toasty under my plastic, it might kill all that garlic we had just planted. Or, more likely, if I waited too long, the garlic might sprout and suffer the same fate as the weeds.
A couple days after having that thought, I removed the plastic. As luck would have it, my timing was pretty good. The plastic had largely stunted the growth of the weeds (all but the most ambitious thistles and a bit of grass), but it had also warmed the soil and kept it moist enough to force the garlic to sprout. And since it wasn’t getting enough light, it really struggled to grow. As a result, the garlic now appears to have a head start over the weeds. It just needs some sunshine. Unfortunately, the forecast is for clouds and rain the next ten days. Still, I think just being exposed to daylight now will help it enough to survive until we get some sunny days again.
In the mean time, I’ve got some clearly discernible rows of garlic between which I can hoe and lay cardboard. I’ll just leave that to decompose in place over the winter, and weeds shouldn’t be too much of a problem then next year. While that’s going on, I’ll spread compost on an area the same size right next to this, and lay out the black plastic on top of it for the winter. By spring, it should be relatively easy to prepare for planting. It’ll just be a matter of using a cultivator and rake to dig the rocks out, like I did here.
