Gardening can be a real challenge when it seems you have every weed known to mankind growing in your veggie patch. Weeds can easily overcome a newly seeded garden and choke it out. Weeding can be a tiresome chore, so here are a few pointers to help you win the war on weeds.

Know Your Enemy
If you have a particularly aggressive weed in the garden, identify it and learn about how it grows and reproduces. This will help you figure out the best way to manage it.
For example, buttercup can be an aggressive garden weed. It spreads by runners, and produces little plantlets at each runner. If you rototilled this into the garden you would only propagate it. This weed needs to be removed from the garden.
Morning glory is another nasty weed that fills the soil with rhizomes. Chop these rhizomes up and you end up creating hundreds on new plantlets. When pulling out morning glory, follow the rhizomes and try to pull as much of the root out as possible.
Do everything you can to prevent the weed from propagating. Chop the weed before it flowers and produces seeds. Remove the entire weed if it can propagate vegetatively.
Stop the propagation and exhaust the weed seed bank.

Fast Crops Competitive Crops
Grow crops that can compete with weeds. Fast maturing crops like radish or miniature turnips can be harvested before most weeds will go to seeds. Tilling and killing the weeds between crops stops weed seed production.
Salad greens like mizuna are very competitive, especially if seeded heavily in two inch wide bands in the row, each row about six inches apart. The resulting canopy of mizuna crowds out many weeds.

Use Transplants
Transplants are the best strategy where weed seed populations are high. They give your crop a significant head start on any weeds. Till the surface to kill any weeds prior to planting. Fertilize each transplant with compost in the planting hole, as opposed to broadcasting it, in order to avoid feeding future weeds between the rows. Combine transplants with mulch for the best results.

Garden Bed Preparations
Shape the garden beds and get them ready for planting, but wait for a couple of weeks before seeding to allow the weed seeds to germinate. Then, till the upper ½ of soil to kill the tiny weeds and plant your seeds. Avoid tilling too deep as this will bring a fresh load of weed seeds to the surface.
When spacing your rows, nice straight rows with adequate space between them for a hoe will make the weeding chore easier.
In small gardens it may be easy to bring in a couple of inches of soil which will bury the weeds, or at least significantly hamper their development during that growing season. Plant into the clean soil and try to avoid bringing the weedy subsoil up the surface. If you are not growing root crops, a couple of layers of newsprint under the clean soil will further hamper any weeds and act as an indicator if you are digging to deep.

Raised Garden Beds
Raised beds make garden management easier. With a raised bed you have a defined border around the garden, and a barrier to encroaching weeds. A raised bed can be easily filled with clean, weed free soil / compost. Treat the soil in a newly filled raised bed like sacred ground. Never toss a shove of soil that you swept off the driveway into your garden. That shovel could have a million weed seeds in it, and could result in hours and hours of weeding, or lost crops due to weed competition. Only put soil in the garden that you know is clean of weeds. Practicing good garden soil hygiene will pay off with weed free gardening.

Mulch
Placing mulch around the base of your crop will smother weeds and retain soil moisture. There’s a variety of mulches available, such as paper, plastic and straw.
Plastic mulch comes in variety of types, but I suggest using a type of plastic that allows water to penetrate it, like landscaping cloth. This makes irrigation much easier. Paper mulch is great in the veggie garden because it biodegrades and disappears in about a year. No pulling swaths of plastic out of the garden at the end of the year. The paper is not as strong as plastic, and critters, like skunks and raccoons, can easily dig through it.
Straw can also be used, but in general it is used for the foot paths, or for the strawberries. I also grow potatoes in trenches filled with straw. The straw smoothers the weeds, but the potatoes grow up through the straw.

Tools of the Trade
Every year a new garden tool appears on the market, and occasionally I buy one. I think of my garden tools like paint brushes to an artist. I have a variety of weeding tools, and each tool has its use, but for general weeding my favourite is the simple loop hoe. The loop hoe is light and only works on small weeds, but it allows me to stand up while performing close and accurate weeding of the crop, with less chance of damaging the crops root system. When I need to dig the odd dandelion out, I like to use the scythe hoe. When I’m hoeing between rows the standard garden hoe works great. The right tool for the right job can make fast work of the weeds.

A properly managed garden can be incredibly easy to care for when there are no weeds, and the lack of weed competition results in bigger, healthier yields. Weeds will always be trying to get into the garden, via the wind or the birds, but if you practise a little weed wisdom your garden will be a relaxing success.