Five Tips for Weeds in your Garden and Life

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Weeds.  If you garden, they are everywhere. If you’re a Christian gardener, you also become aware of the weeds of sin.

Here are five tips (and two bonuses) for eliminating physical weeds.  The applications to spiritual gardening in our own and our children’s lives are endless.   

1. Get them while they’re still small.  Not only is it easier to pull up small weeds, but some older weeds have special survival strategies that make them almost impossible to pull—like putting down roots from the stems or having jointed stems that break when you pull on them.
2. During weed season be out there daily, pulling weeds.  There is a time of year—and of life—when seeds germinate.  That’s when the gardener should be busiest.
3. Don’t only pick the weeds you see.  Also stir up the soil to kill the ones just germinating.
4. Mulch.  This prevents many weed seedlings from coming up, and it also keeps moisture in the soil.
5. Never, ever allow weeds to go to seed.  If you discover a large one (some always make it past steps 1-4) pull it out if possible.  If you cannot do so without damaging your harvest, then cut the weed off as close to the root as possible, and keep doing so.

Bonus tip #1:  Do not put seedy weeds or the roots of perennial weeds on your compost pile.

Bonus tip #2:  Pray.

— For more inspiration for both kinds of weeding, see Workin’ It Mondays, The Better Mom, No Ordinary Blog Hop, Sustainable Ways, Encourage One Another Wednesday, Women Living Well Wednesdays, Works For Me Wednesday , Raising Homemakers, Wise Woman Link-Up,  Simple Lives, and Spiritual Sundays.