I am sorry that you are having such difficulties. In sq. ft. gardening, the plants are squeezed so close together the weeds rarely get a chance to get a foot hold.
Then in the winter, they have cover crops grown so close together that the weed don’t grow. The mel’s mix is easy to pull out whatever needs to be done-much easier than regular soil.
I am sometimes tempted though to simply grow stuff in containers. All the planting done on a patio table saving the back. Hope you get better soon.
Yes, I love it when my plants are close together and nothing grows. That seems to be happening where I planted the arugula and lettuces. I went out and watered this morning and took a look at them in the raised beds.
There is beds aren’t an issue, the soil there is so loose I can pull out weeds easily. And I only have five of them, doesn’t take too long.
Now it’s the 40 x 100‘ garden! Hubby does rototill between the rows, but still, the garden is just too big for me and my weak arms. We really need to plant less.
Speaking of winter and cover crops, this last winter I threw a bunch of leaves and mulch and stuff on top of the raised beds, mainly because I wanted to see if the biennial plants would come back and give me some seeds. Only the onions are coming back. But I had hardly any weeds when I took the mulch off. So that worked out pretty good :-)
Thank you for the well wishes green eyes. My arms are doing a little better. So silly me when I watered, using my zero how was that I absolutely love because it is so light, I also pulled up a few weeds. I shouldn’t have done that! But the garden calls you know?
I am considering using chickweed as a cover crop over the winter, but I don’t have enough seeds collected yet. I love the taste, and it’s easy to pull up.
Can I offer a discussion topic for future posting? The viability of various vegetable garden seeds: sweet corn, black eyed or silver hull peas, lettuce, squash, watermelon, tomato, etc. I just planted Mississippi Silverhull pea seed that is 20 years old; I planted same last year and had 80-90% germination. What about sweet corn seed?