I'm new to this website. For various reasons, I'm getting a late start on my gardening. I have 2 dormant raised vegetable beds (each 4' x 12'), separated from the lawn by 2' wide walkway of packed dirt and woodchips. While clearing weeds and old growth there yesterday, I found small mushrooms, various weeds and insects, and SLUGS!!

I plan to add compost, but before I do that, I want to get rid of leftover seeds, spores, and slugs and their eggs.

I had read somewhere that an effective way to kill off weeds and critters in the soil is to use black plastic to cover for awhile. Would anyone recommend this method or suggest an alternative?

It is nice to know that I am not the only new one to this site.I have been fighting bind weed for some time now and was told by one of the old timers here to cover with black plastic. I tried it on selected rows, didnt really help with the bind weed problem but I ended up with some fantistic soil and a lesser weed problem, a large drop in cut wormsand the earth worms didn't seem to mind. I covered last summer after shoving everything I had for compost under the plastic.

Look on this site for solarization--it uses clear plastic but I am not sure what mil to use--it really kills everything. I put clear plastic over my raised gardens every year (I have 8 of them). It does not kill all of the weeds since I do it more to warm up the soil than kill anything but the weeds that are going to grow do so earlier than ususal so I can destroy them before I plant the veggies. Slugs like shade so maybe using clear plastic killed any that were there. I haven't had a problem with them since I started 'warming up' my garden in February.

Solarization is the route. To be effective you should use clear plastic in the heat of the summer for 6 weeks. It only kills seeds near the surface so all those old nasty seeds further down need to be brought to the surface to be killed! One of the benefits of no-till. Although something is better than nothing, only sometimes, of course. No matter what I do the pigweed and nutgrass manage to survive.

Good luck,
Dirt (not to be confused with older than..."

I think you mean solarization. Down here in zone eight we wet the ground down and cover it in clear plastic(weighting down the edges). We then leave it for about six weeks and the heat trapped by the sun kills the weed seeds and most diseases down to about 8 inches deep. We normally do it in late summer or fall for late fall or spring planting. You can leave the plastic in place untill right before you are ready to plant.

Black plastic does not work for bindweed! But if you must use a bindweed-infested space, it does hold it back temporarily. You may have to rip the bindweed out of holes you plant in and from around the sides (it will crawl across the top of your mulch).

I really recommend densely cover-cropping an area, or even mowing the bindweed (but not tilling). There is sometimes a reason to till binweed though--if your patch is so infested it can't get any thicker and you want to weaken it by repeated tillings (everytime it starts sprouting again), or when you are prepping to sow groundcover/green manure.

Solarization does not appear to work for bindweed. Those seeds are just too tough. I have heard that spraying the plants with a vinegar-water combo helps. I generally go for the thick-sown green manure. But you do have to till it down and resow throughout the season. In my experience, the cover crop (I used annual rye grass) will smother it out for a time, but as the ryegrass matures, the bindweed starts taking over again. It's an ugly thing to see your beautiful cover crop dragged down and engulfed by bindweed.

Whatever you do, do NOT let the bindweed flower and go to seed. Last year, I pulled some very thick rope-like ten and twelve foot bindweed roots out and hung them over a tall trellis. My mom says that helps to keep snakes from coming back to life--I hoped it would help with the bindweed! (I don't kill snakes, by the way, but my mom is a hyper-phobic).