COMPOSTING WEEDS IN A SMALL GARDEN

We all have them, plants that have started growing in the wrong place. In my first year in my garden I left everything to grow, afraid to chop something that was actually an intentional plant from the previous owner. At the end of this summer, after a three week holiday, I ca back to my garden with many weeds and grasses that had started to set seed. I chopped them all, but did not want to drop them with their seeds ensuring an abundance of work for me next year, so what to do with them. In my relatively small garden I don’t produce enough green and brown matter at the same time to start a hot composting pile, but for that same reason I don’t want any nutrients to escape the compost pile. So I did some research 1 and found a solution I’m going to give a try. So here it comes:

Anearobic decomposing in a bucket of water.

Add all the weeds that have set seed to a tub or bucket and cover them with (rain)water – and preferably a lid so you don’t have to top it up. Leave that for a month and the lack of light and air should by that point have killed off most of the seeds and roots. As a yield you have created a fertilizer tea you can spread over your garden and the leftover plant tissue can be safely added to the compost pile. Crisis averted :p

I’ve tried a batch myself in September and was happy with the results. I had two big tubs which I stacked and added flat stones to the top to weigh it down. The fertilizer tea I added to my vegetable bed and the left-over plant sludge to my compost pile, which decomposed very quickly. I can’t say anything about how well it killed the seeds until spring of course, but other seeds have sprouted in the compost pile, but none of the plants I drowned. So I have good hopes for the effectiveness of this experiment.

1 https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/ingredients/weeds-in-compost.html https://mynjgarden.com/2010/12/weeds-in-the-compost-pile/