Jane Moore has some advice on showing your weeds who's in charge

Reproduced from July 07 issue of Gardeners' World magazine. This month's issue on sale now. Subscribe now by direct debit and save 25 per cent.

Ahh, June! It's a lovely month for gardeners - warm, wet and sunny, it's perfect growing weather. Unfortunately, all those nasty weeds love it too, so this is the time to stop them in their tracks.

Take your eye off the ball this month and you'll end up with fruit and veg choked with weeds. You'll also be storing up problems for later on, because healthy weeds flower and fruit extremely well, scattering their seeds far and wide to germinate for years to come.

Weeds are also a serious social faux pas because your allotment neighbours will see how vigorously your unchecked weeds are growing and be cursing you for condemning their own plots. Not ideal for a summer of neighbourly cultivation.

Be realistic

You need to get real right from the start. Unless you can visit your plot every day, it will never be weed-free. There is always one plot on any site that is pristine and perfectly free of weeds, but it will not be yours unless you are totally obsessed.

The thing with weeds is to root out the ones that are flowering or about to flower, as they'll be seeding all over the place in a day or two. When time is tight, I whizz around digging and pulling up anything that looks in imminent danger of seeding. I also clear around any young plants to make sure they get enough light and moisture to grow properly.

I try to work systematically through the plot after that, clearing each bed as I go and leaving the shrubby areas of fruit bushes and raspberries until last. These have large, established root systems and won't be threatened by a few weeds.

Early in the season I leave the nettle patch by the compost bin well alone, as nettles make extremely popular food for many butterfly and moth caterpillars. A good ecosystem means a healthy plot for an organic grower.

They can't all be bad...can they?

If you've just started gardening, learning how to identify different types of weeds is not easy. But it's important that you learn to do so, because then you'll know which ones are the real nasties and which ones you can tolerate. Some are certainly worse than others.

I bet you can already recognise quite a few of the real offenders, such as dandelion, bindweed and horsetail. You've probably also heard of couch grass, and when you start digging it up you'll realise what it is, believe me. On the surface it just looks like normal grass but beneath the soil lie long white roots like noodles, stretching across vast areas. Digging out couch grass is a painstaking task, as every broken piece of stem will re-sprout and grow into a new plant.

Bindweed and horsetail are much the same and, because these are perennials, it's likely they'll pose a problem for you for some years to come. They die back to their roots in winter and grow afresh every spring, plaguing your plot throughout the summer. Keep at it though, because it's possible to control them and eventually you can be totally rid of them for good.

Although annual weeds are much less pernicious, the sheer quantity of them tends to overwhelm the new plotter. Groundsel, chickweed, Good King Henry, sun spurge - you'll get to know them all intimately over the next few weeks.

These annuals grow rapidly when the soil has been disturbed by planting, watering and weeding. Some species can grow, flower and seed in a matter of days, which means you really do need to visit the plot at least once a week to keep it in order. At the moment, Lizzy and I usually pop up there at least twice a week, safe in the knowledge that things will calm down when the weather gets really hot.

How to keep one step ahead

Now you can recognise the weeds, it's time to deal with them. Hand weeding is simple and thorough, but time consuming. Hoeing is quick and easy but the weeds do tend to re-grow. If, like us, you can't manage the hoeing all at once, there are also various mulches to consider.

• Hoeing is fast and really efficient on a hot sunny day. Lizzy maintains that it only chops the tops off the weeds and that they are still able to re-grow with a vengeance. That's true at times, but a hot day can frizzle those chopped stems to a crisp, seedlings are slaughtered at one jab of a hoe and, quite frankly, it was the only way I could cope when Lizzy was away for three weeks last June.
• Weeding by hand is undoubtedly by far the best method but it's a labour of love. It's a joy after it has rained - the weeds slip out of the moist ground with their roots intact, but if the soil is dry and hard the roots often break off. Don't get too bogged down with weeding by hand. If you're pushed for time (or your back is feeling a bit sore), it's better to whisk a hoe around a few beds than to have one perfect bed and the rest a forest of weeds.
• Mulching is a must on our plot. We use carpet and woodchip to mulch our paths, and a weed-suppressing membrane to cover the pumpkin and squash bed so we don't need to weed between the plants. You can use black plastic in the same way, but it deteriorates after one season and you must puncture holes in it to allow water through. There are risks attached to using carpet, because chemicals in the fibres can leach into the soil. But we've used good-quality wool carpet on the plot from the word go, to smother and hopefully weaken a particularly large patch of bindweed. It seems to have worked on our potato patch this year.