Gardening! and Weed Pulling Tips

Overrun with weeds in the garden or flowerbeds? Keep reading for some practical weed pulling tips to keeping your garden spaces free of weeds.

I have spent the last week doing yard work. 

 I got flowers for mother's day. The kind that last all summer long. I filled this pot and my walkway with flowers. 

For the most part, I've been pulling weeds. I filled an entire truck bed with weeds.  Here's the main spot that I've been working on. 

On the left is what it looked like a few weeks ago. 

To the right is what it looks like now.  {Don't look too close. I pulled some of them last week and they're already starting to grow back}  Keep reading for my weeding tips!

The bare section in the back is where we're going to plant our pumpkins, watermelon and cucumbers. 

You can actually see the strawberry plants now. Along the fence we planted concord grapes {for juicing} We planted this whole section last year and it's thriving.

These are the first two to ripen.

And there are a whole bunch of blossoms. 

A few weeks from now we'll be busy picking and eating lots of strawberries.

Here's a look at one of our garden boxes. There are tomatoes and cantaloupe.

My husband planted them this year. 
We have two other boxes. One has peas, carrots and lettuce. The other we just planted with beans {seeds} yesterday.

Here are my raspberries:

 It's hard to believe I started with 6 small raspberry plants. Now the whole back corner of the house is covered with them. 

For what it's worth, here are my tips for weeding:

Weed Pulling Tips in the Garden

1. Probably the best thing you can do is to wet down the soil. This is especially important if you've become overrun with weeds like I had. I went out each night and dumped water all over all the weeds. Then the next morning the weeds pulled right out. The spots that I had not gotten very wet were much harder to pull.

2. Be prepared to get down and dirty. By this I mean wear old clothes and get down on your hands and knees. Nothing is harder on your back than bending at the waist and trying to pull weeds. To help protect your knees you can wear knee pads. I don't have any, so when I'm working in a rocky area or a spot filled with "pokey's", I grab a piece of cardboard to kneel on. Then the pokey's don't get me.

3. Pull weeds regularly. After the first spring weed pulling session, go out regularly{at least once a week} and pull any weeds that have popped up.  If they don't get to big, they are much easier to pull.

I feel a little like the pot calling the kettle black with that last tip. I always have good intentions, but by the end of the summer, I usually have neglected the garden. 

But this year I'm really going to try and keep the weeds pulled.

What are your tips for keeping your weeds down?