Clearing vegetable patch please :)

A question about : Clearing vegetable patch please :)

Hi,
Ive got an 18ft square vegetable patch. Its covered in weeds and blackberry bushes. Im trying to clear it but it seems an impossible task.
I dont really want to use and chemicals because i want my produce to be organic, but i really dont know how im going to clear these weeds!

Maybe a long weekend of weeding is in order

Any help would be appreciated.

Best answers:

• thanks lazy_Ike ill buy some roundup today. Where can i find the legislation for organic farming.
  Thanks
• https://www.defra.gov.uk/farm/organic...ion-standards/
• Thanks squeaky
• You're welcome It looks like rather dry reading.
• Personally I wouldn't use ANY chemicals, just down to personal preference. I'm not convinced that anything that kills plants can be remotely good for insects and other positive creatures or organisms living in the soil.
  I would strongly recommend a weekend of blitzing the place. This is what my boyfriend and I did with my three patches over a weekend. We pulled out all the surface weeds we could see first. The he made a seive out of a wooden frame and mesh (you can buy these, too), and we dug a massive hole for the bed, and seived the soil back in (me shovelling, him shaking). The seive removed all weeds, and stones. As a result, two years on, those beds suffer VERY few weeds, and have a good even texture which I add organic matter to when I can.
  It did make us ache that weekend, but the feeling was one of complete satisfaction, and knowing that I wasn't harming anything beneficial in the area. Good luck!
• Can you still hire rotovators from Hire-It or some other hire shop? This is one way to do it - just get one for half a day and churn up the ground as best you can. It will chop up the weed roots, so you have to be careful to get them out afterwards. They are quite hard work to use but not nearly as bad as digging!
• Loadsabob i think this is what i might do. What sort of size wire mesh did you use?
  A rotovator would be nice but costs money.. I want my vegetable patch to be true MSE style!
• What I used to do was turn the soil over fairly late in the year. Dig out a spade full and dump it straight back into the whole it came out of upside down so that the greenery is buried and the roots are at the top. Lack of light takes care of the green bits and winter frost does for the roots. No other work needed. In early spring it'll just need a light going over with maybe half a dozen dinky weeds to deal with and your soil has been composted to boot!
• very clever squeaky... ive never known a frost to be 'helpful'
• It really is. I can't physically dig the garden these days - but in my youth it was a regular October Job.
• Ive been doing mine for 2 months.I dig it with the pick axe and pull out all the weeds I can see.So far I've got a good 30ft square and have 2 rows of potatoes in and 2 of french beans just sown.Ours has been a blackberry nightmare for 10 years .
• Round Up use would prevent you from being organic. As time goes by, several faults are being revealed about this Monsanto product. Frogs & toads are being killed in run off waters. Micro organisms are killed where it falls on soil. You cannot kill with a chemical in nature & think you are doing the right thing.
  GM crops are being touted and named by Monsanto as Round-Up ready - that is they do not now absorb Round-Up. (So what happened before).
  Agent orange was used to defoliate jungles in N.Vietnam & many people have birth defects right now.Guess who made that? Many US soldiers have died of bladder cancer after going through defoliated areas, including the mad army bloke who formed the basis for the mad helicopter major in Apocalypse Now.
  Steer clear of these Monsanto chemicals.
• we tried glyphosphate last year.We did 2 applications at sunny times(about 6 months apart I think) but hardly anything actually died,thats why this year I thought I'd just dig the lot.The brambles are the main problem for me but the pick axe is very useful as it can get all around underneath them and then I can pull them out.We've had about 4 bonfires and filled 5 garden sacks for the garden waste collection.The sieve idea is a good one,I might try that.We have loads of little stones in our earth (my neighbour says they seem to breed),so carrots would have a hard time.
• Bindweed is the problem in our garden. Can you ever get rid of it? If so, how?
  Any suggestions ever so gratefully received.
  Some years ago when we had an allotment we cleared some of it by hand but the rest we covered up with abit of old carpet for a few months until we had time to deal with it. It did kill the weeds but the soil seemed a bit sour from being covered up.
  If you've got rid of most of the big brambles and you've plenty of time to take over clearing the rest of it, Monty Don suggests just strimmimg it or mowing it every week for a few months. Eventually it turns into proper grass and the other weeds give up. Then you can take the top layer of grass off with a spade and stack it to rot down into loam, and dig the underneath layer.
  Has anyone tried this? I might try it if we manage to buy a small strip of land that runs alongside our garden which is a complete wilderness. I could probably persuade DH to do the strimming - funny how a lot of men like the slash and burn style of gardening but not the bent back pull it up by hand bit