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Bought a house last winter. It has a good size garden in the back which I wanted to plant up. A few weeks ago I went out and dug out a bunch of the weeds pictured below. I dug as deep as possible to get as much of the roots as I could.

The weather started turning cold again, so I waited to plant. Now the garden is full of this weed again. What is it and what can I kill it with that won't affect the growth of the vegetables I hope to plant in the next week or so. If it helps, I am in Ohio.

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It's thistles. You're probably doing the right thing - just keep at it. This time of year, weeds can seem unbeatable.

The main thing is to loosen the soil out about a foot from a big thistle, with a gardening fork or similar. Then try to get all the roots in one go with a spade, or by pulling. With little ones that regrew from little roots you missed, you don't have to go out so far.

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You can also find weeding tools like this one that let you get down below the roots and pop the weed out. You can find larger versions as well that let you do all the weeding standing up. – Doresoom May 3 '12 at 15:15

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