Updated on February 14th, 2026 Posted In: Gardening Know How
Author: Alexandra Campbell

The no-nonsense guide to weeding your garden easily

If you want expert advice on weeding your garden, these tried-and-tested tips come straight from professional gardeners, experienced garden writers and popular YouTubers.

Discover how they tackle weeds effectively, protect soil health and save hours of effort.

And you’ll also find out why some widely advertised solutions just don’t work in real life!

If you prefer watching a video to reading a post, see How To Weed Your Garden on the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel.

Why weeds matter – will weeds really damage my plants?

The main reason for weeding is that weeds take up space and nourishment in the soil. That’s particularly important if you are growing food to eat, because vegetables need space and nutrients in order to grow to the ideal size for harvest.

Weeds are also very successful plants. That means they can dominate your borders and crowd out other plants.

And until recently, gardeners took pride in making sure there were no weeds in their gardens. It was something you ‘had to do.’

But sometimes weeds will grow where nothing else will grow. They can be pretty. And many of them support local wildlife.

So we now realise that not all weeds are bad. However, you do need to find out more, so that you can decide which weeds you want to keep and which ones to weed out.

When is the best time to weed your garden?

You can weed your garden at any time of year – except during snow and ice!

But spring and early summer is the very best time to weed because that is when garden weeds are emerging.

So if you take out the young weeds, they won’t come up to flower. You’ll have fewer weeds later on.

You can weed at any time of day. It’s often easier to pull weeds out after it’s been raining, but you can weed after dry or wet weather.

If I have a job I don’t enjoy, I break it down into manageable chunks by setting a timer for 15 minutes. I weed for exactly 15 minutes, then I allow myself to stop.

If it’s a big job, such as doing a spring tidy-up or de-cluttering a shed, then I’ll do several 15 minute sessions for several days. But if it’s a regular job, then try to do 15  minutes on a regular basis.

Many years before I had a garden of my own, I visited a grand open garden. I was with a friend who knew the owner so we were chatting to her. Suddenly she bent down, mid conversation, and removed a weed from the border.

If you pick out a weed every time you see one, you’ll make a big difference to your garden.

I was impressed by this, because she had a team of professional gardeners. But the weeds still grew. And when she saw one, she removed it immediately even if she was in the middle of doing something else.

I’ve always remembered that lesson – that you always need to be alert for garden weeds and you need to deal with them immediately.

The four basic ways of weeding your garden

There isn’t one way of weeding your garden. There are four basic ways. Use all four depending on the situation. Gardening World presenter and garden designer Mark Lane sums these up:

1. Dig out weeds completely by hand, including the roots. If you leave even a scrap of root behind, it can re-grow.
2. Cover weeds with a very thick mulch, black plastic or landscape fabric. This deprives them of light so they can’t photosynthesise and eventually die off.
3. Use weedkillers, either as a spray or a topical application, such as a gel.
4. Hoe your weeds.

Award-winning garden designer and Gardeners World presenter Mark Lane.

How to weed your garden quickly

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that spray weedkillers will weed your garden quickly. Going quickly round your garden with a spray often also kills off or damages the plants you want to keep.

You can fiddle around protecting plants with plastic bags while you spray, but that is not quick.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but hand weeding is probably the quickest and most effective way to weed a garden. If you’re short of time, just make yourself do a few ten or fifteen minute sessions. They will soon add up.

A friend of mine who worked with the RHS gave me the best gardening tip ever. When I first moved in our house, he told me to weed and mulch all round my garden before even thinking about what new plants to buy.

Do a small section at a time. Hand weed your plants and then cover the area with a layer of well rotted manure, garden compost, bark chippings or other mulch.

This deprives the weeds of light. It slows them down, so fewer annual weeds re-grow. And when weeds do grow, their roots seek out nutritious mulch at the top. This can make them much easier to pull out when they reappear.

How to stop weeds coming back…

Understand what kind of weeds you have in your garden. Depending on where you live, identify your most common weeds, then check whether they are annual or perennial. Go to a reliable site, such as the RHS – there is lots of inaccurate information about this on the internet.

Annual weeds sprout, flower and die in one year. After they flower, they go to seed. Then the seeds spread round your garden. These include common chickweed, purslane and fat hen.

The best way to stop annual weeds from coming back is to layer a couple of inches of mulch on your border once a year. You can use bark chippings, well rotted manure or garden compost (See here for a really simple guide to making compost.)

This layer of mulch takes light away from seeds, so fewer will sprout into weeds.

You can also hoe annual weeds. A hoe will chop the little leaves off and the plant will die. You can leave the chopped-up seedlings on the soil – annual seedlings won’t grow again.

Perennial weeds need a different kind of weeding…

However, if you hoe perennial weeds, they will sprout again.

That’s because perennial weeds have roots which stay in the ground for three years or more. If you chop its leaves off, the perennial weed just grows back. Perennial weeds include dandelions, ground elder, bindweed, creeping buttercup and many more.

The best way to stop perennial weeds from coming back is to dig the whole root out. However, they can sprout again from tiny scraps of root.

People are sometimes told that using landscape fabric/weed control fabric will help stop weeds coming back. It works for a few months, but it’s not a long-term solution.

There’s more about this below under ‘Why there is no such thing as a weed-free garden’.

Weeding a neglected garden

If you take over a garden which has been neglected, then you will be faced with a huge number of weeds.  You may have to deal with them in different ways.

When Mike and Natalie Newman took over their garden, it had been rented out, then left empty over several years. So it was over-run with weeds and self-seeded trees. They had to use professionals to clear the denser areas of brambles and undergrowth.

However, they hand-weeded the front lawn and kept mowing it. It returned to a normal lawn within a summer.

Read their tips in Where do you start with a neglected garden?’

Why there is no such thing as a weed-free garden…

Nobody has ever achieved a weed-free garden. And if anyone promises you that landscape fabric or artificial lawn means ‘no weeding’, then do not believe them.

You can minimise weeds. You can get the most effective weeding tools (see below). But whether you spray everything with chemicals or smother every inch of your garden in weed suppressing membrane, you will still get weeds in the future.

If you have researched ‘weeding’ on the Internet – as I have – you will find claims that covering your ground in horticultural membrane or artificial grass means that you’ll never have to weed again. But this is not true.

Like every form of weed control, horticultural membrane/landscape fabric/artificial grass does control weeds, very effectively. But only for a few months.

If you cover the membrane with gravel or mulch, weed seeds settle in that. Annual weeds are blown in by the wind and grow on top. They also grow in the dust that settles on top of artificial grass.

Why you can’t beat perennial weeds with landscape fabric or artificial grass

Weeds can also pop up around the sides of a light excluding mulch, landscape fabric or artificial grass. And if you cut holes in a landscape fabric or horticultural membrane to plant plants, then weeds will grow out of the holes with the plants.

This path has a ‘weed suppressing membrane’ (landscape fabric) under it. These suppress perennial weed roots directly below them. However annual weeds soon settle on top. The perennial weeds’ roots also snake out under the edges of the membrane to emerge in an adjacent border. The same happens with artificial grass.

Once you have accepted that no garden can be permanently weed-free, then weeding becomes much easier. You’re no longer fighting a losing battle. You can work out a strategy that works for you. Think of weeding as being like brushing your hair.

You can choose an easy-care hair style, and get the best hairbrush for your hair. You can decide that you like the un-brushed look. But you will regularly – usually daily – have to brush your hair.

Although I must admit that my garden is often full of weeds and my hair could be tidier.

Consider a more relaxed approach to weeds. At RHS Chelsea 2024, many gardens showed plants that were formerly considered weeds, such as cow parsley. To see more garden trends, read 8 inspiring ideas for your garden from RHS Chelsea 2024.

Weeding without chemicals

There are four ways to weed listed above. Three of them involve weeding without chemicals. If you don’t want to use commercial weed-killers in your garden, then stick to a combination of hand weeding, hoe-ing and a light-excluding mulch.

There are recipes on the internet for killing weeds with salt, vinegar or boiling water. These are all contact herbicides, which means they kill the leaves they touch. They don’t kill the roots. But they also kill any other leaves they touch, so it is difficult to use them in a crowded border.

If you re-apply contact herbicides often enough, the roots will die off. But wouldn’t it be less effort to hand-weed them out in the first place?

I’ve found that one of the best ways to weed without chemicals is to use a layer of cardboard as mulch. There’s more about how to do it in An Easy Way to Weed Without Chemicals.

Does salt, vinegar or boiling water work as a weed killer?

Just because something is home-made, it doesn’t automatically mean it is safe.

Or that it is cheaper. The University of Maryland did a study on using vinegar as a household weed-killer. They worked out that, by the time you have killed the weeds properly with a vinegar solution, you would have spent more on vinegar than you would have done on commercial weed killer.

‘Agricultural vinegar’ is the most effective weed killer but it has 20% acetic acid and can burn your skin or eyes badly. It should not be used by amateurs.

And salt leaches into the soil. It can damage the vital micro-organisms in the soil. You may have problems planting in that area.

As for boiling water – how do you keep a kettle boiling as you rush down the garden to that patch of bindweed at the bottom?

The best weeding tools

Garden designer Lee Burkhill of the Garden Ninja youtube channel thinks that the Japanese gardening knife or hori hori is the best weeding tool. He’s also got a video on killing weeds with weed burner. You may like to consider it, as I haven’t covered weed burners here.

Garden designer, Lee Burkhill of the Garden Ninja YouTube channel.

I also use something similar – I think it’s known as a patio knife. It’s a garden knife with a right angled tip, designed to scrape out weeds between patio pavers. Mine is the Wolf Garten Garden Scraper. I first discovered it when I saw a professional gardener use it for all kinds of weeding. Since then I’ve found that it’s exactly the right tool for weeding in my garden.

Note that links to Amazon are affiliate, see disclosure. Other links are not affiliate.

My weeding tools – a dandelion weeder from Spear & Jackson and a dandelion trowel from Sneeboer, as well as the Wolf Garten scraper. The right tool can make a big difference to weeding.

For weeds with a deep tap root, such as dandelions, my husband uses something that looks like a very thin, long hand trowel. And, of course, you can always use a hand fork.

This is an American weeding knife, and it belongs to Tom Coward, head gardener at Gravetye Manor Hotel. It’s very similar to a hori-hori.

And although gardening gloves are not strictly tools, it’s a good idea to wear them when weeding. Some weeds are prickly and others irritate sensitive skin. See my post on choosing the best gardening gloves.

If you have a bad back, then don’t bend over to weed. Use a kneeler (such as this Thistlewood kneeler) or knee pads.

I’ve used the Spear & Jackson Kew knee pads happily. My husband prefers something more heavy duty, such as these Thunderbolt knee pads, especially if he is weeding a gravel path.

And don’t weed in any position for too long. Put your timer on and switch to another gardening job after 10 or 15 minutes!.

The best way to use a light excluding fabric

It is quick and easy to cover a border completely with light excluding fabric.

If you are creating a new border or restoring a neglected one, this is a good way of getting rid of perennial weeds. But it means you can’t have any flowers or plants you want while the landscape fabric/horticultural membrane is down.

You can use black horticultural plastic, landscape fabric or even cardboard. The cardboard will decompose into compost and enrich the soil in a few months. You’ll have to remove light excluding fabric when its job is done as it won’t compost down.

I asked organic no-dig gardener Charles Dowding of the Charles Dowding Youtube channel for his tips.

Charles advises laying down your light-excluding material in February while the weeds are still dormant.  ‘It will take about three to four months to kill off creeping buttercup in this way. Couch grass will take 7 or 8 months. And bindweed can survive under light-excluding matting for a couple of years.’

Charles suggests covering your border for one season ‘to weaken the bindweed.’ Then follow up with regular hand weeding – you need to do it every week.

I’m clearing a patch of ground elder by leaving it covered with horticultural membrane for a summer. I have to check around the edges regularly and also weight it down well. I left this on for around a year, and have since planted it with comfrey. The comfrey is vigorous and out-competes the ground elder.

You will need to weigh down the black plastic as I have found that the wind whips it off quite easily.

And check around the edges.  Many perennial weeds have incredibly long roots. The photo below shows just one piece of bindweed I got out from a border. You can see how easily a root could sneak back into your “weed-free” border!

All this is just one strand of bindweed which I weeded out of my garden yesterday. Those roots can travel!

Or use a living light-excluding layer of mulch

There are also living mulches that break down over time to feed the soil, such as bark mulch, chipped wood and straw mulch. I’m trying out a layer of straw mulch (Strulch) on my veg borders at the moment.

The idea is that the layer of mulch deprives annual weed seeds of light. It’s been on for around 5 weeks, and it has certainly slowed down the growth of weeds, but it hasn’t stopped them.

It’s not a substitute for regular hand weeding. But it means that every session of regular hand weeding can be done quickly. There are fewer weeds and those which do grow come out really easily.

Well rotted manure, bark chippings or garden compost can also be used as a light-excluding mulch. As it breaks down it will improve your soil.

The same goes for grass clippings. We often cover our borders in a layer of grass clippings. My mother thought that you would get grass growing in the borders, but unless your lawn has gone to seed, you won’t. The grass clippings will break down.

But don’t use grass clippings if you use herbicides or weed killers on your lawn. The grass clippings may kill the plants in your border.

If you do want to use chemical based weed killers

Mark also mentions chemical or herbicide sprays. He recommends a spot treatment on plants rather than sprays.

I agree completely because I have found it impossible to protect the plants adjacent to weeds when using a spray.

I cover them with plastic or I cover the weeds with a plastic bag and spray inside that and I only spray on wind free days, but the weedkiller spray always always affects the plants beside it.

And dabbing a spot of herbicide or weed killer on each leaf is time consuming and fiddly. You might as well weed by hand.

How to hoe

And then there’s hoeing. I asked Charles Dowding how to hoe. He says you need to start hoeing as soon as you see the tiniest shimmer of green: ‘There’s a saying that you need to start hoeing your weeds before you can see them.’

Just tickle the surface of the earth – the top few inches – with the hoe. This chops the heads off any annual weeds. He just leaves the weed heads on the earth. They will decompose and won’t grow again.

Charles Dowding of the Charles Dowding YouTube channel and author of many books including Organic Gardening, The Natural No Dig Way. I talked to Charles to find out how no-dig/no till works for flower gardens.

Hoe-ing is not hard work.

A full-size hoe works well for plants in rows, such as vegetables. And you can cover a lot of area in a short time. Charles uses an oscillating hoe. I have just ordered one (not the same brand as Charles’).

If you have a crowded border, a hand hoe will be easier to use. I use a stirrup hand hoe like this one from Burgon & Ball.

Other ways of making weeding easier

As well as using good tools, there are other ways of making weeding a bit easier.

Disposing of weeds adds to the work.

Alex Mitchell, gardening journalist and author of Crops in Tight Spots, on growing vegetables in small spaces, says she ‘just turns annual weeds into the soil so they rot down, as long as they haven’t flowered,’ she says. She also lets perennial weeds die completely then adds them to her compost heap.

Crops in Tight Spots by Alex Mitchell

Liz Zorab of the YouTube channel Liz Zorab -Byther Farm is a ‘homesteader’ (someone who aims for a self-sufficient lifestyle). She only weeds where she needs to – which is the vegetable bed. Vegetables really hate the competition from weeds.

So if your weeding time is limited, start with the veg patch.

Weeding your garden with the help of friends and family

And then there’s getting help.

Blue Peter presenter and Skinny Jean Gardener podcaster, Lee Connelly, author of How to Get Kids Gardening, says that children will enjoy helping you weed if you make it a competition – ‘see who can fill the biggest bucket.’

Skinny Jean Gardener, Lee Connelly and his book, How to Get Kids Gardening. The book has lots of tips and tricks to help you encourage your children into gardening. It makes gardening a fun activity for the family, and could give them a lifelong love of it.

There’s always the issue of whether children or other helpers can tell the difference between weeds and plants you want to keep, in which case here’s an easy trick. Mr Middlesize weeds our paths and terrace, but has no intention of learning anything about either plants or weeds. So I tell him that if there’s a plant growing on the path, it shouldn’t be there, so it’s a weed.

Pay someone else to do your weeding

If you really hate weeding, can you afford a gardener? Even gardening professionals often pay someone else to help them.

A trained gardener can weed far more efficiently than you can. This post will help you find the right gardener for your garden and give you some ideas on what you should pay.  It’s not a minimum-wage job. Gardeners have to be trained, and they need proper tools and professional insurance.

‘De-classifying weeds…’

You can also cut down on weeding your garden by cutting down on the number of plants you consider weeds. Many weeds are effectively wild flowers. They are hugely important for wildlife, especially pollinators.

So there’s a trend towards tolerating or encouraging plants that would have been yanked out as weeds just a few years ago.

As Jack Wallington, garden designer and author of Wild About Weeds, says ‘Re-assess the weeds in your garden and see if you can even find one you’re happy to tolerate, because not having to weed it out will make your gardening easier and more pleasurable.’

Wild About Weeds will help you work out which weeds to keep and which to weed out. Read my interview with Jack here.

And there are also some local gardens where weeds play an important part – see are we seeing a new direction in weeds.

These Spanish bluebells are considered weeds by some people because they are very invasive. On the left hand side of the dog is a creeping buttercup, which definitely is an invasive weed. I can tolerate the bluebells, though I do pull quite a few up every year. The creeping buttercup has to go.

People are now questioning many of the gardening jobs we’ve always assumed were essential. You don’t have to dig – see no dig for flower borders. And you may not need to clear away all your leaves in autumn. See leave the leaves to find out how little weed blowing and raking you really need to do.

Re-wilding also involves allowing some weeds to grow. See discover the magic of a re-wilded garden to see if this approach is for you.

Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes’s garden in Wales, Veddw, has featured in lists of the 100 most beautiful British gardens. They have a low-maintenance approach to gardening and Anne even allows some weeds – even ground elder – to become part of the garden. It’s very pretty. See The Low Maintenance Garden That Really Looks Fabulous.

Turn your weeds into tea…

Weeds have their uses. Some gardeners even make tea with their weeds.

Nick Moyle of the Two Thirsty Gardeners blog has a new book out called Wild Tea. It has recipes for making teas from several weeds – nettles and dandelions, as well as from a range of garden plants, such as rhubarb, thyme, bay, borage or rose.

Nick says “I always see if there’s a good reason for declassifying a plant as a ‘weed’ in my garden before despatching it. Can I eat it? Can it be turned into a drink? Does it look nice? Does the wildlife appreciate its presence? Once I’ve gone through that assessment I’m not left with much, apart from bindweed and couch grass – and for that I have no tips, other than a long, labour intensive battle.”

Change your weeding mindset…

Perhaps one of the best ways of weeding your garden is to change your mindset.

My daughter has been living with us, working from home. At the end of the day, she does fifteen minutes weeding because it gives her eyes a rest from the computer screen and she enjoys the fresh air.

Recent research has shown that turning the earth while weeding releases microbes into the air. When you inhale them, your serotonin levels rise and you feel more relaxed.

Think positive…

A friend of mine very kindly weeds my garden when she comes to stay, because she says she finds it relaxing. I’m always thrilled at the bags of weeds that pile up behind her.

But, until recently, I hadn’t realised that I should have followed up on the beds she weeded, even just for a few minutes a day. I had thought ‘oh, good, that border won’t need weeding for a month or so.’ By which time it was thick with weeds again.

So perhaps it’s time to consider weeding your garden as therapy for you, not just for your garden.

And like many therapies, it’s something you have to keep on doing.

Pin to remember weeding your garden

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