Garden Tool Comparison Simple Organic Weed Control Builds Soil! No Gimmicks!

Hey, there folks! This is Berry&Bird. Welcome back to the farm today. We're going to be using some garden tools. We're going to be controlling weeds in our garden and, as you can see, they've gotten out of hand. I did it on purpose so that I could show you just how simple and easy my method of controlling weeds in your garden actually builds garden soil. It's organic, it's no sprays, it's no chemicals, and it actually makes your garden pop. It makes your garden grow better this year and your garden grow better next year. It makes it retain moisture. Come along, we're going to have some fun, and I'm going to show you some cool tools that you may have never seen to weed your garden with and give you some great ideas for your garden this year.

So, what we have here are several tools. Just a standard hoe, then I've got what I call a spade hoe, which is for getting into tight little spots with that spade. Then I have an old-fashioned tool, which some of you guys may have may not see, but it's a like a pitchfork rake for raking out your ground, and this is very helpful for getting weeds out and also helpful for breaking out the mulch that we're getting ready to use. Then we have a handheld cultivator, which is pretty cool. We'll show you how we use all these for weed control, but really the go-to is this loop hoe. This is the most handy-dandy tool you can have. So, it has two sharp edges, and basically you just rub through the ground and it cuts the roots of the weeds and kills them. Pretty awesome stuff.

Now, hoeing and weeding is hard, hard work, and what I'm going to show you today is a way to keep from having to hoe and weed so much. We'll just be using compost and mulch around our garden, and it'll help build our garden soil. So, come over here, and I'll show you what we're doing. So, right here, we have areas that we have not weeded. Right here is a row that we have weeded. We didn't cut any weeds; we didn't hoe any weeds. All we did was put down this composted mulch back here, and that's how we're building our garden year after year, and that's how we're controlling our weeds. We're basically mulching our entire garden.

Now, you can't till this into the soil this year because if you did, the plants wouldn't grow. If you want to control weeds, cover the weeds, let this rot over the winter, and then we'll till it back in, or we can go in no-till and just plant our plants right directly into it because the soil underneath it is rock star because we've done this for four years now.

I'm going to do a bit of a tool comparison for you to show you why we like that loop hoe so much. It works so much better than any other way. It really, really does. Check it out. We're going to try all these different weeding tools, and then we'll show you the loop hoe.

I'm going to do a bit of a tool comparison for you to show you why we like that loop hoe so much. It works so much better than any other way. It really, really does. Check it out. We're going to try all these different weeding tools, and then we'll show you the loop hoe.

This is the little pitchfork rake, and this is how it works for controlling weeds. Basically, you just come through here and rake, and it pulls up these little weeds. Pretty handy, pretty helpful. Does a pretty good job. The soil is really, really, really loose in the garden here, but you can see it's lacking in a few departments.

This is the little handheld cultivator, and we basically just roll through the weeds and it pulverizes them. Now, you can do a whole row of weeds with this in about 15 minutes, and these are about 150-foot rows or something like that. So, really a good workout, but you can see you've still got weeds that are in here in soil, and they're going to sprout right back up. So, if you do this on a very hot summer day, you're liable to kill most your weeds, and that makes a pretty garden bed right there.

Now, the next two things we'll use are our spade hoe and our standard hoe. And basically, with the hoe, all you're doing is just getting in here, skimming the top of the ground, and making a pile. Basically, definitely not the most efficient tool. And neither is this, but this is good for getting in close to your tomato plants and stuff like that. I'll show you. So, we've got a tomato plant right here, and basically, with this little hoe, we can get in here and come all the way around the plant and pull all the weeds. We can be a little more precise because it's got that tip on it. That spade really, really helps out.

If you guys have any tips or any pointers you'd like to leave, please post them down there in the comments. And it won't hurt to rake up soil up against the bottom of this tomato plant because it'll just sprout roots all the way up to wherever you bury it up. Now, for my baby, the loop hoe. So, the loop hoe basically, if you push and pull, so this is a cutting edge and that's a cutting edge, and those two cutting edges push and pull right on the surface of the ground and just eliminate your weeds. Basically, shaving the weeds off, and you do this on a hot day.

You can see the amount of ground that we've covered right here, and those weeds will compost right back into the soil. Look at the amount of ground that we cover with the loop hoe versus the other tools in just seconds. That is just an awesome, awesome tool for your garden, guys. If you don't have one of these in your gardening, I'll post a link down in the video description. They're not very expensive. This is the True Temper brand, and as long as you keep it in out of the weather and put a little linseed oil on that handle, this thing will last you years and years and years.

So, let's show you how we holistically control the weeds. This is how we eliminate the weeds, and once we're done holistically controlling our weeds and helping our garden retain moisture, we'll go back through with this probably once a week, and we'll walk up and down each row and we'll just nip with the corner. We'll just nip out the little weeds that we want to get rid of. Pretty cool. Let's take it to the mulch pile now.

We've got a bit of a head start on our mulch, and this is basically a big pile of wood chips that came from the tree company when they cut out for the power lines. If you ever see those guys in your neighborhood, you can always stop and ask them if they've got a place to dump. If they don't, have them dump it at your place and use it in your garden, use it on your yard. It is awesome. It turns into black gold.

So, we've already done the squash patch on this side when we left this so you could see what it looked like before. Now you can see a lot of green in between the rows. These came in a little thicker. This is a yellow squash, this is a zucchini squash right here, but you can see how nicely mulched it is. There's not a weed anywhere to be found right there.

"Wait a minute, Berry&Bird! I thought you were going to show us an easier way to garden!" This is an easier way to garden, and year after year you'll build your garden, and you'll have a bangin' garden instead of fighting it with chemical fertilizer. So, we'll load up our wheelbarrow here, and this is just basically an old pitchfork. We'll pitchfork it all in the wheelbarrow, we'll head out to the end of the row, and we'll work our way back towards the piles. And we'll basically do this over the whole garden. Now, you don't have to do this every day. You only have to do this once. You don't have to do the whole garden in a day. Do one row on Monday, one row on Tuesday.

When you get home from work, wake up in the morning on Saturday, do another row. As long as your weeds don't get really, really tall and out of hand, you'll be totally covered. Once you wrap your garden up with this mulch, it will solve all of your weed problems.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "What if we don't have access to this, or what if we're doing this on such a small scale that we don't need a giant truckload of mulch?" Now, this is probably four truckloads of mulch. What you do is you go to your local hardware store, your local Lowe's or Home Depot, or wherever, if you don't like the big-box stores, or your local garden center, and you pick up some either garden mulch or garden soil, some untreated mulch. You don't want the treated kind like you put around your house because that's treated to cut down on bugs, termites, and may cut down on beneficial insects and worms. You want those microbes, you want those worms, you want all that stuff in your garden in your soil, building soil year after year.

So, you can do this on a smaller scale. If you don't have a pickup truck, go by a trash barrel and put it in the back seat of your car, fill it up with mulch, and put it on your garden. It really, really works guys. So, we're gonna get busy, we're going to load this wheelbarrow up, and I'll show you how we put it around our tomatoes and I'll show you how we put it around our squash. If you thought you were gonna have a big beautiful garden and not have to work a little bit, you're dead wrong. You're gonna have to work if you want something. You gotta work for it. Let me show you how we do our tomato plants.

We'll pack some around the tomato plant real quick. We tilled up a nasty piece of soil here. There was an old house here at one time. I find stuff like this all the time. Glad I didn't find it in a tractor tire. So, we'll show you from start to finish around a couple tomato plants. Basically, what I do is I just mound up the mulch around the plants and then I'll just pull it in next to it, covering up all the weeds and helping support the plant just a little bit too, just like so. And whatever is left over in this mound will help next year's garden to grow. So, we'll go over each row and bed it up just like this, and in the middle of the rows in between, we'll really put a heavy layer so that we never have to walk in mud when we're walking up and down our rows.

Here's what we do for a squash plant: Basically, we just put a pile of mulch in between the two squash plants. Then we'll take the mulch and spread it out around the plant, raising the leaves up gently. Just be gentle with your plants. Go right in there and now all the delicate work has been done. It's going to take a little time and effort, but once we go around each plant, each delicate plant will go back and we'll fill in the ditches with a heavy coat of mulch. Basically, this pile right here will feed next year's garden, and the microbes from it will feed this year's garden a little bit.

Guys, I hope you've learned a little bit about holistic gardening practices today. I hope you'll do some stuff to help build your garden. If you have any questions, please post them down in the comments section. If you need anything, let me know. I'm here for you. I hope to see you again here on the Farm, and you can watch this garden grow throughout the season. Thanks a lot. See you next time.