Organic, No-till Weed Control with Stale Seed Beds
Not today, weeds, tilling, or herbicides!
Maybe you’ve been here before too- you create the perfect little seed beds for your carrots, lettuce, or corn only to find them germinating alongside a sea of weeds. Turns out the soil was full of weed seeds just waiting for the perfect conditions to burst to life as well. As a seed farm, we always have seeds adding themselves to the soil, both from weeds and from the seed crops we grow. It can be so discouraging to see my teeny tiny seedlings coming up with weeds, knowing that weeding them out before they impact the crop will take hours I don’t have. And because we grow organically, we need to use mechanical techniques to get rid of weeds, not herbicides.
But one organic, no-till weed control method called STALE SEED BEDDING is giving us life and restoring our hope:
Stale seed bedding is really an elegant method. Prior to planting, weeds are encouraged to germinate through a little watering and maybe some row cover to keep the soil warm. Using either tarps or a flame thrower, the tiny seedlings that have germinated are smothered or burnt so that they die, leaving a pristine seedbed for the intended crops. We use both tarps and a flame thrower for our stale seed beds here at Giving Ground.
The soil has to be moist to get seeds to germinate under tarps, so place your tarps on in late winter before the soil dries out. Here is what weeds look like as they germinate under the tarps. They will die from lack of light before the tarps are removed:
We often use a flame thrower in tandem with the tarps. Once the tarps are removed, we water the row a little and put row cover on it. This will germinate any seeds that were waiting for more heat, as the soil can stay quite cool even under black tarps, but the row cover allows radiant heat in from the sun.
When we use the flame thrower, we try to get the seedlings just as they are coming up, making one pass close to the weeds so that they really fry. Larger weeds will burn but take a lot more fuel, so timing is important:
When we plant after using one or both of these stale seed bed methods, we try to disturb the soil as little as possible so that more weeds seeds aren’t getting turned up. The idea with the stale seed bed is to not cultivate the soil after because that would only bring up more weed seeds to germinate. Here is the super narrow hoe I’m using to make a furrow after this bed was flamed:
Some weed seeds still germinate, probably because of the light soil disturbance that happens during planting or because the temperatures weren’t yet warm enough to germinate them initially, but its much less than if we hadn’t prepped the bed this way.
Again, if you’re wanting to get as many weed seeds as possible to germinate, covering with row cover can really speed that up as it keeps the soil warmer:
We are using this on a pretty large scale, but I think both methods would be awesome for a backyard garden. The tarps we use are recycled billboard tarps that are UV stable. We got them on Craigslist where they are often listed as “hay tarps” for covering hay bales in winter. A flame thrower is an upfront cost but will save you hours, weeks, months, years???
