By RACHEL HUNTER

Staff writer

While recent snowfall is encouraging for local farmers, it also adds moisture weeds need to overtake area gardens.

“I just know it is going to be a bad year for weeds,” Esther Good of Peabody said, explaining she plans to spend at least 10 hours per week in her gardens this summer. “My knees hurt already, just thinking about all the work.”

Local experts expect the weeds to be deeply rooted this year, as they try to reach any moisture available in the soil.

Therefore, area gardeners, like Good, are planning to do anything they can to make sure that no weeds steal nutrition from their flower and vegetable beds.

Good said she uses baking soda to eliminate dandelions in her flower beds and a vodka-dish soap-water solution for an instant multi-purpose weed killer.

“It gets right in there and kills them all dead,” she said. “There’s nothing better if you want them really gone.”

Other than that, she knows it is going to take a lot of determination and elbow grease to get the weeds out of her garden.

In preparation, she is already gathering supplies to eliminate “the nasties.”

“I’ve got four bottles of vodka on the shelf, and just bought five boxes of baking soda,” Good said. “There’s no weed that I can’t kill — or die trying.”