3 ways to effectively prevent and remove weeds in your garden

Weeds are the bane of any gardener, so it's important to get ahead of them. Whether you're tending to a giant flower bed or simply adding some colour to your patio with planters, here are three tips to help you out.

Attentive mulching will go a long way toward preventing weed problems, but in every garden some weeds invariably find places to grow.

• Weeds are always most troublesome in open, cultivated soil that receives abundant sunshine, but even shade gardens can become targets for vining weeds and unwanted tree seedlings.
• Beds filled with flowering plants often must be weeded by hand, which can be a pleasant chore if done when the soil is moist so that weeds pull free with ease. Wear comfortable, close-fitting gloves, and make use of a kneeling pad.
• Don't rest when your bed is clean. Instead, mulch the weeded space immediately to frustrate weedy replacements, which will certainly appear if the area is left unmulched.

• Where you have more space to work, a sharp hoe can make quick work of eliminating young weeds, which will quickly wither in the sun when they are sliced off just below the soil's surface.
• You may need a pair of pliers to pull and twist out woody weeds, which have extremely tough, tenacious roots.
• When woody tree or shrub seedlings are simply cut off at ground level, they will often resprout from the roots left behind.
• To control the worst weeds, cover the ground with a commercial non-woven fabric weed barrier, and then cover the fabric with an attractive organic mulch. This is the best way to keep weeds out of new ground cover plantings or shrub groupings until they reach mature size.

A slicing instrument like a hoe does a much better job of cutting through weeds when it has a sharp edge.

• Use a metal file or whetstone to sharpen your hoe after every time you use it.
• To make digging easier, sharpen your spade every few weeks during the growing season as well.