The City Girl's Guide to Country Gardening Lesson 11: Weed Wars

City boys Josh and Brent have a hard time keeping weeds at bay in their country garden, sometimes even accidentally munching on them in homemade salads. Catch the garden shenanigans on The Fabulous Beekman Boys.

Back when I first started this whole gardening business, I operated under the (you say naive/I say idealistic!) assumption that once I pulled out a weed, that would be that. No more weed.

Stop laughing, expert gardeners. Obviously, I've had that dream crushed and how. Here's a picture of our biggest flower bed, about two weeks after we pulled every last weed out the first time. (A project that took about four straight days of hot and sweaty effort, by the way.)

You are looking at approximately 2,000 stinging nettles, a particularly unattractive and horrible weed, which has taken over my yard with an evil and sinister vengeance. These weeds are tough and covered in little spikes, so you can't even attempt to pull them out by hand and usually have to dig up each one using a spade (and wearing thick gloves and long sleeves). The roots can be a foot long. And every time I pulled one, I swear, three more grew back in its place, almost overnight. They were growing so fast and so furiously that I had two hardcore organic gardening friends sigh in despair and say — fully shamefaced, barely above a whisper — "it might be time for RoundUp."

But, as defeating as these stinging nettles were, shooting up through my baby zinnias and threatening to overwhelm my poor little snapdragons, I wasn't quite ready to go to the pesticides. So I tried Amy's recipe for an all-natural weed-killer, from GreenGardenista.com:

Apple Cider Vinegar, and White Vinegar can be mixed in gallon form with a variety of other household items like soap, table salt, water, and alcoholic beverages to make a more potent and environmentally safe weed killer for late season weeds. Adding a cup of salt to a gallon of vinegar, and a small squirt of dish soap can create a valuable spray weed killer. Not all vinegar recipes will kill the tough roots of a plant, but most will, and this DIY approach to weed killing has the effectiveness of Round-UP, killing anything it is sprayed on. Use Vinegar carefully around turf grass, and plants that you want to keep.

And, for extra insurance, I also borrowed her strategy of using newspapers (you could also use cardboard boxes) to smother weeds:

A layer of about 6-8 pages of completely biodegradable newsprint (or one layer of corrugated cardboard box) can go under 2-3 inches of mulch to create a great barrier for several months of weed free gardening! It was a great way to get rid of all those moving boxes and supplies, and it's worked beautifully in my yard!

* I recommend cross-hatching paper, or boxes and immediately covering what you have laid with mulch, so an errant breeze doesn't relocate your project to your neighbor's yard. * Boxes often do well when wet with a hose before you lay the mulch, to assist in softening the edges. I don't recommend using boxes in any area you may want to add bulbs to at a later date, as boxes biodegrade at a slower rate than the newsprint, and will hinder your efforts. * I often keep an extra bag of mulch on hand to cover over any edges that pop up through the mulch in the first few weeks. * Colored advertisements are not recommended under mulch, because of possible toxic dye in the ink, so use those at your own risk.

First, we put in several more hours of hard labor pulling out the current crop of stinging nettles. Next, I mixed apple vinegar, white vinegar, eco-friendly dish soap and eco-friendly all-purpose cleaner into a spray bottle, and saturated all the places where we had pulled up weeds, being careful to avoid the actual flowers in our bed.

Then, I topped all the open spaces in the bed with a thick layer of newspaper, and soaked that in more vinegar, just to be stupidly thorough. So, here's our garden, post-Operation Weed Kill:

With the newspaper and vinegar solution in place and not a stinging nettle in sight, we piled on a healthy 3-4 inches of mulch and called it a (very long) day.

It's been two weeks and sadly, I can't say we're 100% weed-free — the stinging nettles continue to resurface in the places where we couldn't vinegar or newspaper (so, especially around the flowers that we were trying not to kill and the edges of the bed). But it's a lot easier to quickly pull out 40-odd baby nettles than it is to hoe up 2000 nearly-full-grown ones. And I'm continuing to spot-treat with my vinegar solution as I go, in the hopes that we'll continue to hold back the tide.

I'm also planning to try Colleen's baking soda trick. Do you have any great and green weed-killing strategies to share?