Unwanted reseeding?

Back for another year of SFG help

I'm a bit concerned about what I may find as the weather warms up. I became a bit (okay, a lot) lazy at the end of last season and let a lot of my tomatoes/peppers/eggplants drop and rot. I'm afraid I'm going to have a mess with unwanted seedlings where I don't want them. Is there anything I can do now to prevent a mess in the spring? Should I cover my boxes with black plastic and try to bake them? Thanks for any advice, I'm looking forward to starting my garden up again!

Diana

This happens in my garden a well...As soon as your mix is thawed out, take off your grid if it still in place, and cultivate the mix; use a garden fork to loosen the mix. Add your compost and level out the mix. Add the grid and when you sow new seeds , know where you put them. You will get to know what doesn't belong as it will probably not look like what it is you planted and there will be fewer of them. Just pull out the unwanted sprouts.

Hi neighbor to the north, I'm south of Columbus.
Another way in addition to Camprn's advice -- If you want to start out with a clean slate so to speak, a trick is to loosen the mix as Camprn already said. Then I would put clear plastic right on top of Mel's Mix. The dark soil attracts the heat of the sun and the plastic helps hold the heat. Little unwanted sprouts will try to grow and get fried by the heat and plastic. I would repeat again, mixing the soil, cover with plastic. I have to do it this way since I leave hay topped with plastic on top of the mix during winter to insulate and encourage my worms to stick around. So I have to get serious about removing the hay and leftover sprouting hay seeds. It is extra work but the benefit of worm casts is what I'm after.

I read a book, 'Weedless Gardening' by Lee Reich, and learned his technique works.

I, too, leave my dead plants and stems in the garden all winter. I'm so tired by fall with all the garden and yard chores, harvesting, raking lawns and leaves, flower beds, hauling away and storing statuary, etc that I can't clean it all up. So in the early spring, I just remove most of the garden plants and stems in each raised bed and then I do NOT rake or hoe the bed, but leave it otherwise undisturbed.

Next I cover each bed with 4 sheets of dampened newspaper, and over the paper I add about 3" of compost. The beds are left alone until its time to plant. In the meantime, the newspaper is keeping sunlight from any seeds and the dormant seeds have been undisturbed by rake or hoe and haven't been pulled to the surface where sunshine would prompt them to flourish. Also, the newspaper is deteriorating slowly underground even as it prevents unwantaed seeds from sprouting.

When I need to transplant, I just dig down thru the compost and any newspaper still intact to put in my new crops. If I'm sowing seeds, I just sow them on top of the bed of compost, again I'm not raking down deep to bring up weed seeds. By the time the newly-sown seed has roots, the paper is no longer a problem to pierce. Result: Minimal weeds (or past crop seeds). I recommend the book. Its a good read.