How did Covid change your garden?

[YumYum]

Plus a lot of grocery store vegetables do not taste good.

You got that right.

 

[MiniOrchardDude]

I'm doing this in the middle of a field that's grown up terribly with weeds so I'm worried if I don't spend a full year cleaning the ground that I'll just have a garden full of weeds in a few months.

I had the same issue. Cardboard and chips worked great for me if you can find someone to drop them off. I expand my garden every year the same way. Started a new expansion last year. Will finish it in the spring. Here are a few pics.

MOD

 

[Mike121]

I had the same issue. Cardboard and chips worked great for me if you can find someone to drop them off. I expand my garden every year the same way. Started a new expansion last year. Will finish it in the spring. Here are a few pics.

MOD

That looks great!

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I looked at it and thought, 'Yes, It's great with the trees, but what if you wanted to grow veg.? then I remembered I once wanted to reclaim a bit of land like that and had an old wool carpet I covered it in, cut slits in, and surface planted potatoes, though I admit it wasn't hugely successful at growing potatoes it cleared the land quite well. Then there was a woman who gardened with hay, she bought it by the bale and covered the garden in it, replacing it when it broke down into mulch, when she wanted to plant something she simply parted it to expose a bit of ground and planted in it, if she saw any weed she would dump hay on them.

If you started collecting organic material to dump on it now By Spring it would be easy to clear minimal spaces to plant in and maintain the smothering around them.
I would be careful of cardboard, so much of it is recycled and plastic is added, you don't want plastics in the soil if you can help it.

It depends how you feel about it.
I would still go the route of cutting out squares, but I would make a trench of them and bury a lot of wood under them if I did it now. I like to kn.ow what I am doing has a deeper effect than just treating the surface for a small veg garden.
If I suddenly got a decent size piece of land and wanted to do it quickly I think I might take the other route and suppress everything with wood chips and chainsaw dust, pretty available and easy to hoe and suppress weeds, and will mulch in in time.

MiniOrchardDude is right about doing it bit by bit. Partly you don't want to knock yourself out and make it a chore, It's not just suppressing the weeds, it's what you do next as well. Also you will learn about your land by using it and might take a very different route for the next bit

 

[MiniOrchardDude]

If you started collecting organic material to dump on it now By Spring it would be easy to clear minimal spaces to plant in and maintain the smothering around them.
I would be careful of cardboard, so much of it is recycled and plastic is added, you don't want plastics in the soil if you can help

I should have mentioned, remove any plastic shipping tape, never use any cardboard that is shiny, remove all labels.

Any shipping tape you miss will eventually show up at one point so make sure to remove it all.

Shiny cardboard might have toxic paint. Those usually are colored for cosmetics.

Some labels are shiny or have a metal insert.

Before I had a steady supply of cardboard I would buy builders paper by the rolls.

MOD

 

[Mr_Yan]

I do a ton with cardboard sheet mulching and tree service woodchips. Great way to make an area usable as a garden given time, say maybe a season or two.

Then there was a woman who gardened with hay, she bought it by the bale and covered the garden in it, replacing it when it broke down into mulch, when she wanted to plant something she simply parted it to expose a bit of ground and planted in it, if she saw any weed she would dump hay on them

I've done the straw bale gardens with a lot of luck but ended that after reading too many accounts of straw bales with persistent herbicides ruining gardens.

 

[Oliver Buckle]

I've done the straw bale gardens with a lot of luck but ended that after reading too many accounts of straw bales with persistent herbicides ruining gardens.

I have heard of this with grass, didn't think of them being used on grain crops as well as well. Are they used on all crops from that family, oats, barley, maize, for example?

 

[Esther Knapicius]

Did not change mine at all.

 

[Mr_Yan]

I have heard of this with grass, didn't think of them being used on grain crops as well as well. Are they used on all crops from that family, oats, barley, maize, for example?

The use of persistent herbicides and pesticides is getting more common, according to some. There are stories of one called "Grazon" that will be sprayed to kill broadleaf weeds but keep the grasses for grazing. The cattle then can eat the field grass and the herbicide will not degrade during the digestion and persist in the cow manure. So when the manure is used as a fertilizer input it is actually carrying a broadleaf herbicide and kills off the garden / field.

There are other stories where something like Roundup is sprayed on a wheat field to kill the wheat for harvest. This has all the wheat dry and ready for harvest at the same time but the persistent formulations of Roundup will stay on the straw and then the straw is no longer usable as mulch or other garden uses. Some people have even asked if this Roundup use is actually behind some of the reason people don't think they can digest gluten.

Just my quick dive into local conspiracy theory.

 

[Mr_Yan]

Anyway back to the main topic.

In summer of 2019 I moved from a small urban lot in Illinois to a rental in Michigan. Then at the height of the pandemic I moved from a rental house to one we bought. The previous owner of this house had a garden in place but I changed it significantly by adding raised beds and going no-till. I may have also planted about a dozen fruit trees and another dozen berry bushes and a row of asparagus. Overall covid didn't change how I garden but I changed my location so my garden grew.