Are you dumbfounded by your neighbor’s weeds trying to slip under your side of the fence?
Most gardeners find themselves in such a mess with their neighbors and don’t know how to deal with the problem.
Playing dumb and allowing the weeds to sneak in will starve and wipe out your valuable plants. It is the last thing that you would want.
Weeds are the root causes of a plethora of problems. They not only compete for resources with native plants but can be poisonous to living beings as well.
In addition, they can reduce the fertility of your land and make it uncultivable.
Fortunately, this article provides you with easy-to-implement solutions that help protect your garden from your neighbor’s weeds.
What Damage Do Your Neighbor’s Out Of Control Weeds Bring?
Unless you understand what damage can these pesky weeds do, you may dismiss the problem as a non-issue and pay the price later. Here is why you want to make your garden off-limits to them:
1. Compete For Resources
For your plants to grow healthy, they require a constant supply of nutrients, water, and sunlight, whether naturally or through artificial means.
Being the typical uninvited guests, they will compete for these resources with your plants. Guess the result?
Crop yield and yield quality will drop significantly.
2. Disease-Spreading
Weeds, apart from competing for resources, will also spread diseases in your yard. They hide disease syndromes that affect the yields of the plants in your yard.
Locating the weeds and getting rid of them early enough will save you from potential crop loss.
3. Eat Into Your Crop Space
Weeds coming under the fence bring another problem of space in your yard. Your plants are productive when they have enough space and the rightful growing conditions.
Weeds coming around interfere with spacing and block your flowers and vegetables from getting enough sunlight or rainwater.
How to Stop Weeds From Growing Through The Fence?
It’s easy to control weeds across your yard, but it can be challenging in small spaces. In addition, there are difficult-to-reach areas of your garden where they love to grow.
You will find these small spaces along fences or between sheds where they pass through quickly.
Before we start, you need to have the following things on your checklist.
- Mulch
- Garden hose
- Herbicide
- Vinegar
- Newspaper
- Metallic sheet
1. Hand-Pull The Weeds
A quick manual step to stop your neighbors’ weeds from coming under the fence is to pull them out of the soil.
First, ensure the ground along the fence is wet by drenching it with water an hour before weeding.
Next, gently pull the weed plants out of the soil, ensuring no root is left behind. This could be tedious if you have many weeds along the fence, but it’s worth the time.
2. Spray The Weeds With A Herbicide
Herbicides are effective in controlling weeds. You want to identify the type of weed growing on your fence from your neighbor’s side to help you purchase the ideal variant.
You also want to do the spraying on a windless day to avoid collateral damage to your neighbor’s lawn. Another thing is to ensure that you have read the instructions before applying.
Wear protective gear when spraying the solution to avoid self-poisoning and contamination. We advise putting on long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and using thick rubber gloves.
A typical herbicide to use is Glyphosate. It’s a non-selective herbicide that wipes out most of the weed plants. You can also use organic alternatives.
Keep reapplying the herbicide as is necessary to keep the weeds under control. To avoid damage to your fence plants with herbicides, consider moving or planting them at a slight distance from the fence.
3. Use Boiling Water Or Salt
Pouring boiling water along the fence line is also effective in getting rid of your neighbor’s weeds. An alternative to using boiling water is the use of salt.
Spray it along the edge of the lawn. You can also use white vinegar in place of boiling water.
It effectively destroys the leaves and stems of young and tender weeds. You can use it independently or drench it with water in a ratio of 1:1.
4. Reinforce Your Fence Or Make A Trench
There are landscaping materials you could use to stop your neighbor’s weeds from coming through the fence. Ideally, if your budget allows, you could have a landscaper come around and do the fixing for you.
The landscaper will do a narrow trench along the fence, line it with landscaping fabric, and fill it with rocks.
You could also edge metal sheets on both sides of the fence to prevent weeds from bypassing it.
A similar course of action is to dig a trench beneath the fence and fill it with bricks.
The trench should be about one and a half inches deeper than the bricks and an inch wider.
- First, lay landscaping fabric in the trench.
- Next, fill the trench with sand to about 2 inches.
- Finally, lay the bricks on the sand and hammer them with a rubber mallet.
This helps to align and level them into position. Use a builder’s level to check the placement.
You want to ensure the top of the bricks is one and a half-inch higher than the ground.
5. Use Mulch
Source | https://www.pinterest.com/
Mulch is effective in controlling cross-border weeds. First, dig up the ground along the fence with a spade.
The ditch should be 6 to 8 inches wide and 4 to 5 inches deep.
Spread a thick landscaping fabric along the ditch. You can also use a weed barrier fabric for this purpose.
Fill up the ditch with mulch.
The fabric helps prevent weeds that occasionally sprout in mulch from taking root.
Wood chips or stones can also be used as filler materials.
Benefits Of A Weed Free Garden
Weeds are unadmissible plants in your garden. Undoubtedly, controlling them brings numerous benefits to your garden. Here are some to mention.
- Sufficient supply of nutrients and water for your garden plants
- Bountiful harvest and high crop yield
- Improved crop quality
- A very healthy environment for your children and pets
Some Important Facts
Regardless of the methods we have outlined above; you need to know that it’s impossible to get rid of weeds from your garden permanently.
The best you can do is learn to manage them early during their growth stages.
Some gardeners use weeds for landscaping in shady sites.
Weeds can also be beneficial to your garden plants. They help garden plants with weak roots to penetrate deeper into the soil.
Weeds also help in adding humus to the soil and stabilizing it.
Final Words
If controlling weeds growing in the middle of your garden was easy enough, you also need to stop them from growing under the fence. But, of course, life isn’t meant to be easy.
Hopefully, by deploying the above methods, you won’t threaten your neighbors anytime soon.
