What does everyone use to help keep down the weeds in their gardens? I have raised beds and didn't have much problem last year, but they were overgrown with weeds this spring. I pulled them all out (took many days!), but theyare coming back. I mulched around my strawberries and tomatoes and peppers with some shredded paper. The weeds are poking through in the strawberry bed and it has only been 5 days. I could go and pull them but I only have a couple of days a week that I would havet the time needed to do all the beds. Any suggestions?

Weeds are such a pain....Sorry but I don't have any help for you right now but if you have chickens let them clear out the weeds for you before and after gardening time.

RSmith,We have put wood chips as mulch on all of our raised beds. It is pretty thick. We do still get some of the morning glory and what we call horse tails that come up but they are soooooooooooooo easy to pull now. I have not had much success in directly planting seeds to come up through the mulch so we start most of our plants in our greenhouse and transplant them out into our beds. This is wood chips not beauty bark, so there are not all those lil slivers that make it yucky to work with. We get wood chips by the truck load free from a local tree service company. We put cardboard down first then the wood chips. BONUS!! It saves on having to water the plants too!!

Oh, man! That is a good idea! We had a wood chipper for 12 years. We donated it to a local campground 2 years ago because we used it while clearing the land to build our home, but it sat in storage for 12 years after that! Wish I had it back now.

Wood chips are the way to go my friend:)