You should consider using mulch in your garden. You can spread it around your vegetables and your flowers. Overtime, it will reduce time spent in the garden doing chores such as weeding, fertilizing and trying to control certain pests.
The article below from Better Homes and Gardens gives great details about using mulch in your garden. It also has a short video showing some different types of mulch that you can purchase.
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Mulch’s purpose is pretty basic: It acts as a barrier, keeping sunlight and some air away from the soil surface. Sounds simple enough, but mulch’s smothering effect brings with it both good news and bad. Consider these positive and negative effects of tucking in your soil beneath a blanket of mulch:
- Pro: Without the summer sunrays striking it, soil stays cooler and plant roots don’t stress from the heat.
- Con: Slugs, earwigs, cutworms, and other eat-and-run types love cool, moist, dark places. To minimize bugs, use only a thin layer of mulch, keeping it several inches away from plant bases.
- Pro: Water in the soil doesn’t thaw on sunny winter days then refreeze at night. That’s good news. The melting-and-freezing cycle makes water shrink and expand, possibly popping shallow-rooted plants right out of the ground — a phenomenon called heaving. Heaving spells the end for plants.
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Read the full article at Better Homes and Gardens