Weeds are frequently a gardener’s nightmare, especially when they invade the driveway. Far from being aesthetic, it does not look very neat. A path full of weeds is enough to ruin the most beautiful of gardens. Only two natural solutions allow you to finally see your driveway without any weeds, and it is not necessary to resort to more or less toxic weedkillers to put an end to these undesirable spontaneously growing weeds. Let’s do a check in.
The top: weeding your driveway by hand
Certainly tedious and sometimes a little painful in the lower back, the manual weeding is far the best solution to have a driveway without any unwanted grass. This can take several days if you have a very long and very wide driveway. But the result is clear: it’s perfect and you are rewarded for your efforts for a long time. In addition, it is very eco-friendly and costs nothing.
The procedure is very simple and leaves no holes (or almost none): we equip ourselves with a wheelbarrow and a simple knife with which we dislodge the roots by making a quarter turn with the blade at the foot of the plant taking care to push the tip of the knife into the ground. The herbs thus collected are immediately deposited in the wheelbarrow. Be careful not to shred the roots of certain plants because each small piece can give birth to a new plant (the galley!).
These weeds can then be deposited in the compost only if they have not yet gone to seedOtherwise, we take them to the recycling center. You can also take all the herbs that have been removed from the path.
It’s important to renew the weeding operation by hand as soon as new weeds start showing up rather than waiting for the driveway to look like a fallow lawn! It will then be much faster than the first time, less strenuous too, and it will prevent unwanted spontaneous plants from multiplying vigorously afterwards.
Finally, if you plan to create a driveway, the good idea is to install a geotextile felt of very high quality before laying gravel, pebbles or slabs. Weeding by hand will be disconcertingly easy and, icing on the cake, the geotextile prevents many weeds from developing. But professionals advise replacing it after 10 or 12 years because it loses its effectiveness over time…
Complementary solution: use a thermal weeder in the driveway
This non-polluting device eliminates weeds in an environmentally friendly way. But you can only get a convincing result by strictly following the instructions generally supplied with the machine. Many gardeners don’t even bother to read it, so they use their thermal weeder despite common sense and conclude, of course, that this type of device is useless. It’s wrong !
The thermal weed control is a technique that works provided you do not try to calcine the plant insisting because it would be counterproductive. On the contrary, we expose each weed to high heat for 60 seconds only in order to generate theleaf system cell burst. This is how we then observe the total destruction of plants passed through a thermal weeder on the condition, however, that they are annual species because the perennials resist it quite well and that the plants are still young.
It is understood that this method can only be suitable for a tiny alley moderately scattered with young annual weeds. It is therefore a good solution if one wishes complete or fine-tune the weeding by handknowing anyway that it is also manually that it will be necessary to remove the dead weeds after a heat treatment.
Essential: weeding your driveway even in winter
If we do not wish to destroy the efforts made over the past year to maintain a driveway in immaculate conditionit’s necessary keep weeding in the winter because the wild grasses are damn tough and able to brave the difficult conditions during the off-season. In the spring, as soon as the temperatures warm, the growth of weeds starts with a bang. It does not take long for these undesirables to transform the driveway into a green corridor under the vexed gaze of the gardener, who was nevertheless full of good will, and who hadn’t counted the hours spent weeding.
It is nevertheless recommended to preserve certain species ofspontaneous herbs that bloom beautifully to allow foraging insects to feed when the garden is still quite poor in inflorescences. In certain judiciously chosen places, we can therefore, for example, delay the removal of the daisy, the thistle, also keep a few dandelions, a little scarlet pimpernel, the buttercup, which is none other than the creeping buttercup, as well as field bindweed. But be careful, you will have to be very vigilant and dislodge these weeds with their roots in March or April because the lilacs, tulips, rosemary and other irises will then be in full bloom, leaving enough insects to forage in the garden.
Do not lie to us, we realize that there is few solutions effective for weeding your garden path without product. But we don’t really care because, by the way, no product no matter how clean the driveway is, weeding done manually.
A truly remarkable result can only be achieved with a war of attrition which leaves no room for discouragement. Tenacity always wins since regular weeding ends up considerably weakening many local species with spontaneous growth. We can only encourage gardeners to weed their driveways by hand always wearing gloves because some species bite.