Weeds in my flower pots - help

Hello everyone,
I am Karen from southwest Georgia and new to Dave's Garden. I was hoping someone here could help me figure out how to eliminate weeds in my flower pots. We have a beautiful garden in our backyard and lots of pots with various plants in them but the weeds are atrocious! I just got through hand-pulling the weeds out of all the pots about 2 weeks ago and they are coming back with a vengeance. The plants got badly frost-bitten over the winter due to our greenhouse getting damaged and the roof blew off (long story). In any case, I have babied these plants for the past month and most of them are doing very well but the weeds are a real pain. I don't know how to get rid of them without damaging the plants.
Would it make any sense to take some newspaper and lay it over the weeds around the plant and then cover the paper with more soil? I have a new bag of Miracle-Gro soil and plenty in there to top off all these pots, but I wanted to deal with the weeds first. I have read about using vinegar and salt etc. but I'm reluctant to use that because of the risk of killing the plants along with the weeds. Does anyone here have any suggestions on how to deal with this effectively and save my plants too? I have no idea what kind of weeds I am dealing with. They look pretty much the same from one pot to the next - if you require a photo to identify it, I will be happy to do that for you if that helps to figure out what to do in order to get rid of the weeds.

Thanks in advance for your help with this. I look forward to trying out your suggestions.

Karen

Hi Karen and welcome to DG. I don't know your gardening preferences but if you aren't strictly organic, you could get some Preen, a pre-emergent, and sprinkle it around your plants in the pots. It sounds like you have weed seeds blowing into your pots and taking root. The Preen will prevent the weed seeds from germinating. But, your pots will have to be where neither children nor pets can get into the soil once you've treated it.

If you like that idea but want something organic, corn gluten is an organic pre-emergent. You could also try putting mulch on the top--just like if you were using it on a garden bed make sure you don't pile it right up to the base of the plant, but around the perimeter of the container you can use it (and that's probably where most of the weeds are anyway)

Putting more soil on the top won't help any--it might help for a short period of time preventing seeds that are already in there from having enough light to germinate, but in the long term it won't help. Plus if your plants are planted to the right depth in the container now, you don't want to add more soil.

Before putting mulch put a ring of landscape fabric on top of the soil then put your mulch on top of that. That will stop those weeds. Remember what ecrane said, don't put it to close to the plant. Good luck

Thank you everyone for your suggestions, I will certainly try these out and see what works best. I have lots of pots to experiment with so I can try a little of everything :-)
I appreciate all your help and I look forward to particpating more in this group.

Karen

When you remove the weeds in the pots, do you remove all the roots? Many weeds will regrow if a tiny root is left behind. Pulling the weeds out don't always remove all the roots.