Weed Eliminators

You'd love to garden but your lawn gets eaten every year by weeds and the ever-expanding garden border. Meanwhile, clutter dominates your house. The first step is to admit you have a problem. The next step: get a garden so you want to spend more time outdoors and less time with all that stuff! One of the myriad advantages of raised bed gardening is that you can easily grow vegetables by square foot. Planting by square foot allows for growing more in less space.

Gardening enthusiast Shirley Brenon, who writes a weekly gardening column for the Palm Springs, California newspaper THE DESERT SUN, encountered a Palm Desert, Caliifornia couple living on a golf course. The lawn kept getting invaded by "nut grass," a weed named because it grows in little nodules in the ground and multiples, above and below ground. The continuously sprouting nodules make gardening difficult--and, frankly, drive horticulturalists nuts.

The California couple with the nut grass problem built a wall and several raised bed gardens, in which the couple planted the flowers that were threatened by nut grass. Now that you've stopped the weed clutter, you can actually get that organic gardening fertilizer out of the jammed garden shed and clean up the yard...the trimmings and leaves will provide instant organic gardening compost. Raised garden beds make your lawn look better. Plus, once your lovely garden is set up, you can maintain it more efficiently, so you can finally tackle your filing system.