DIY Garden Ideas: STOP WEEDS!! Easy ideas..simple tools..organic soil building fun!

Born in farm fans, this is Josh Sternie Ridge Farmer. Welcome to the farm vlog today. Today we're going to go in the garden here and I'm going to show you some cool interesting ways to control weeds without sprays, without chemicals, without anything other than just these two hands and a few simple supplies that will help your garden grow. So come along today and we'll have some fun in the garden and we'll go check on the new baby chicks in the ducks. All right? These are our baby chicks. They're cornish, cross, meat bird chickens. They just arrived yesterday. We got 50 of them. Guys, before we get the video started, I want to let you know I'm not a master gardener and I don't know everything there is to know about gardening. So if there's any tips you might have, please leave them down there in the comments. I'd appreciate it. Before we even set foot in the garden this morning, I want to talk to you a little bit about garden management. This garden right here is probably about a quarter of an acre, maybe a little bit bigger than a quarter of an acre. And it's just about weed-free. If I can do it, you can do it. What you need to do is set aside some time, either in the morning or in the evening, set aside some gardening time. Just for you, it doesn't have to be every day. It can be every other day or every third day. Get yourself a good hoe and work that hoe in your garden. So what we do with our hoe in the garden is we work it. We just work through the soil, turning the soil up, getting rid of all those weeds, those clumps of grass, all that stuff that likes to grow in the garden. Now you've got to get a hold on it now. If you've got a weedy garden, get out there, put some elbow grease into it, water it a little bit in the evening time, then come back through the next morning when the ground is soft on a Saturday or Sunday morning. And get that hoe out there and work out all of that weed structure that's in your garden. I've basically gone through our garden and spent about 15 minutes per day just making sure that the weeds aren't taken hold in the garden. Now the corn patch is a different story. I didn't weed the corn patch and the corn patch is grown up in the grass and weeds and stuff like that, but we have watermelons planted underneath that. We'll take you through and we'll give you a garden update and we'll show you everything that's growing here too. Now folks, I don't care who you are. If you've ever grown a garden, you had trouble with weeds. You've had trouble keeping on top of the weeds and making sure that your garden flourishes and your weeds don't flourish. Last year when we grew this garden, we had a lot of trouble with weeds. We had a lot of trouble with things just not growing right. And we are in a soil-building time here. So this is the third season on this garden right here. And we've been adding biomass. We've been adding material to the soil. We've been adding compost. We've been adding manure. We've been adding wood chips. We've been adding a lot of biomass to the soil. What I'm getting at here is that don't expect to go out and till up a spot in your yard and for it to be absolutely successful your first year. You have to give that garden a little bit of time and a little bit of work. If you are going to start with just a little spot in your yard, I encourage you to till in some composted cow manure and you can buy that by the bag or you can till in some garden soil or some top soil or some potting soil right into your garden bed and get it started. Start small so you don't get overwhelmed and hate gardening. So what we've got here in the garden is a bed of mulch. And this is what I spread just yesterday. And this is basically wood chips that were dumped out here by the tree cleanup crew that works with the county and that works with the power line. So whenever I see those guys in town or around town, I'll stop and ask them and tell them where I'd like some dump because they're always trying to get rid of those wood chips. Now if you don't have this resource you can always get double ground mulch. So you can go to these local mulch places, have a dump truckload of mulch brought out and come out and spread it on your garden. This is one pickup truckload of mulch and it just about covered this whole garden so you don't need much. What you're doing here is you're adding a moisture retention, a weed barrier and also biomass to the soil, introducing microbes to the soil. Which is super duper awesome, great for your soil and the tomato plants are doing great. So once I have my garden planted for the year these are the three most essential tools that I use. First of all, just a simple hoe. So you need to have a good hoe in your garden and basically you just use this guy right here to get it the weeds. And you can get it that root ball really good with just a simple hoe. Now I go through my garden beds and I hoe them out and it's all lumpy and it's all clumpy and it's all a mess. So I follow up with this guy right here, just a simple garden rake. So you can rake out those clumps, you can rake out those clod, you can rake out those clumps of grass. Put them in your row where you're going to be walking and you can just trample them and they'll die. And we also bought a weeding hoe. And this weeding hoe is a pretty cool design. Let me show you. So this hoe is a weeding hoe. This hoe is made to cut through the roots of your weeds in your garden and define weed in a garden. It's anything that you didn't plant or you don't want to grow there. So whether it's grass, whether it's a watermelon that came up from last year, it's still a weed and you want to get it. This has a sharpened edge on both sides so you can push it through the soil and you can pull it through the soil. Now let me show you how we take the garden rake and we just smooth out this mulch and we'll talk a little bit about the mulch as I'm smoothing that out, okay? Let me start by saying that you're not here to bury your plants in mulch. What you're trying to do is just give a nice smooth light coat of mulch over your plants, okay? If you give them too much mulch, then it's going to cause problems. So what I'll do is I'll take my shovel and I'll dump mulch out. Little piles of mulch all the way along here up to the edge of the plant. Tomato plants aren't so bad, you can almost dump right up to the edge of them. Then I'm going to come back through and rake it all out smooth. I want it to be about that thick. I don't want a big thick gob mulch on there because I don't want to encourage rot. I want to encourage moisture retention in my soil and not encourage rot. So we're going to get busy here and rake out this row. And again guys, this is only going to take you five or ten minutes. You're going to have to put some work into your garden if you want your garden to be successful. I'm going to say that that's the biggest tip I can give you is put some elbow grease into that garden and make it successful. So the simple way to make your garden look like this versus a big patch of weeds is this right here and that right there. Elbow grease, you just got to get out, you got to get out and dedicate yourself and do a little bit of work. Now I'm sure you guys probably don't have a garden as big as this. So if you've got a smaller spot, you have even less of an excuse to have a big weedy garden. So go over the lows, go over to Home Depot, buy a couple bags of double ground mulch and get out there in your garden. Weed it, let the weeds die for a couple days and then get back in there and refill it with a little bit of mulch. You don't need to put it in thick and then next year you need to till that mulch in and let it rot and add biomass to the soil. And over the years your garden will explode with awesomeness. Now I'm going to get busy out here raking but I'm going to show you one more thing. It's how we mulch our squash plants, okay? So let's go over to the squash plants. So the squash plants you see here are squash plants we planted three weeks after we planted our first squash plants. Now if you want to have squash all summer long, you need to have a rotational cycle. You need to plant some one week, wait two or three weeks, plant some more, wait two or three weeks, plant some more. By the time the first batch starts to peter out, you're going to have squash from your second and third batches. It's pretty cool. So here's what we do to mulch our squash plants. And you've got to get your hands in the dirt. We just basically go around it lightly. We don't go all the way up against it. We go just like that. Now you're going to have to do your squash plants by hand. You can't get under there and right because the leaves are just too tender. Let me show you. Now for weed controlling the squash patch, you need to get your hands up underneath here. And just shake that mulch right up underneath it, okay? Just like so. Just take your hands and spread it out. Let's show you another plant. You can see these two guys don't have any mulching here. And basically, I just want to get up under there, help support that plant, help support that root system. Get under on this side. Just spread it around and make it nice. Just be sure you support these little leaves so that you don't damage them because they're very, very tender, okay? Now folks, I've got to get busy here on the garden. But be sure you click that like button, subscribe to the channel for more awesome gardening tips and more fun stuff here on the farm. Thanks a lot guys. Pound that like button, subscribe to the channel, click the little bell icon. It'll notify you when I post a new video. And we'll see you next time on the Stany Ridge Farm, alright? In the land of the free. In the stone area. I totally forgot it's going to give you a quick garden tour. So that's sunflowers right there. These are gourds. These are beef eater tomatoes. That's yellow squash. That's zucchini squash. And this is golden queen corn. And it's full of weeds. Down on the other side of the garden we've got a row of blue light green beans. We also have two rows of Roma tomatoes for making sauce. Another row of beef eater tomatoes. We also have some okra down there. It's just coming up and we have some lime of beans.