The best way to have a weed free garden is to not let weeds grow in it. Before you spend too much time looking for hidden wisdom in the last statement, let me digress and explain.

More than twenty years ago when I still had the orchard, my wife and I attended a weeklong international fruit conference in the state of Washington. Part of the program included tours of orchards.

There was one that I will never forget. It was perfect. Everyone there recognized it. When quizzed, the owner stated that he carried all his maintenance tools on his tractor and when he saw a problem he'd stop and fix it.

Shortly after we lose our ability to see a weed and not pull it, our weed problems will nearly end.

Weed control starts before you plant. Planting before thinking about weed control is a sure recipe for failure.

Your pre-plant weed control choices are cultivation, smothering or chemicals. If you go the chemical route with a product like roundup you should make several applications a month or so apart. There are weeds that grow over winter and others that sprout throughout the growing season. Get them all.

Smothering can be accomplished with black plastic or fabric left in place for about two months during the hottest part of the growing season. On a nearly level site a shortcut is cultivation, followed by planting through a several page layer of newspaper and topped with a layer of mulch to hide the newspapers. I haven't figured out how to keep the mulch on the paper where there is much of a slope.

Cultivation is the age-old method of weed control. Unfortunately, weeds follow a hoe. Every time you dig you bring new weed seeds to the surface and the battle continues.

The hoe is valuable if you use it to tackle newly germinated weeds by just scratching the surface. I heard a weed scientist state that cultivation in the evening brings fewer weeds than cultivation earlier in the day. It's something about the seeds needing light to wake up before they can germinate.

When you plant there are two more factors to consider in the battle against weeds. A light layer of mulch will slow weed germination. Too much mulch can impede the plants you wish to grow. I have seen few problems staying in the range of an inch or two.

The second idea suggests a cottage garden. Close planting eliminates space for the weeds and provides shade to reduce light and inhibit germination.

I will claim that after maybe three or four years I have several large shrub and perennial beds where I spend less time annually than I do on the same sized area of grass.

In conclusion, roundup is my friend, I'm nervous about most other garden herbicides, I seldom take the hoe to the garden when I'm chasing weeds and I usually have the stains on my hands to prove it.