Weeding is something you need to stay on top of. If your season is similar to mine (Zone 4B in MN), you can get by only once in late May, weekly in June, and usually only a few big sessions in the summer once the annuals are established.
I use landscape fabric to provide a barrier. However, it would help if you still pulled up the weeds around the plant, and you need to do it before the weeds get so huge that their root system starts to interfere with the flower’s root system.
Here is a personal cautionary tale to teach you to LABEL your plants. I was in a hurry one year and decided to direct sow a ton of hardy annuals for the first time. Let me say this another way: I was an idiot and planted about eight different flowers I had never grown before in the same spot. They can be planted up to 6 weeks before your last frost so that they can germinate any time from 3 to 40 days.
Because I had never grown any of them, I wasn’t particularly familiar with what the seedlings looked like. Guess what starts growing once the soil starts warming up — WEEDS! I didn’t know what a weed was and what a seedling was. It was a disaster. I probably lost 50% of my flowers in that bed because I accidentally pulled them, or the weeds got so overgrown that even when I could identify the flower, the whole thing had to be pulled because the roots were intertwined with weeds.
Morals (yes, plural) of the story: don’t plant a ton of new flowers in the same bed at the same time, stay on top of your weeds, and label everything so you can do a quick google search. (Google: what does an orlaya seedling look like?)
