Here goes, Bart. Lavender lass, I sure wish my garden had a few horses wandering around. Fenced from the garden, of course. That's what my property was when I bought it in 1978, a horse pasture with native alder, maple, hemlock and Doug fir. I rented a bulldozer and put in a driveway and cleared an area for a manufactured home. After that was done an acquaintance needed a place to store his bulldozer. My place was the logical choice. He said I could run it as much as I wanted as long as I kept it full of fluids. After a couple of years I had dug 12 ponds and cleared a lot of land and started growing plants for my landscaping business, focusing on the not so common plants and buying the more common ones wholesale. I propagated them from seeds and cuttings. Made a lot of trades too. Along the way I kept planting trees and shrubs for myself and slowly phasing out the nursery beds. Most of them went through several moves before they found a permanent home. Now, after 35 years, I'm doing a lot of editing. That means cutting lower branches off some trees and sawing down others. I'm even turning the larger rhododendrons in to trees by pruning them to look like trees. Lately I'm concentrating on planting more groundcovers and enlarging and redoing a rock garden. Every so often almost every part of the garden needs a reshuffle. That's the fun part! I really enjoy my neighbor's horse in the pasture next door. He also raises a couple of Angus each summer for beef. Lavender lass, there IS country on this side of the state. ;-) Mike...from Peone Prairie near Mt. Spokane

Wild grape and Chinese wisteria growing like MORE than just weeds. Sometimes I think Monmouth County is just one big Chinese Wisteria farm run amok. I hack at them every week or so pulling up underground vines as far back as I can get them up out of the ground but it's a losing battle. Maybe it's because this is my first year gardening so I'm actually noticing but there seems to be more pests of every kind this year...flying, crawling, burrowing, slithering and walking on 4 legs eating everything in their path above and below ground. I even had a Peahen who just began making a weekly appearance start eating my Alyssum which took forever to bloom from seedlings! My own fault because I felt sorry for her and thought she might be hungry. I threw a tiny bit of cracked corn on the ground for her to eat. The way her head whipped around when she heard that corn hit the driveway and how close she let me get to her tells me she belongs at a farm on the other side of a county road outside my father's neighborhood...not a starving wild foundling I need to help survive! She had her corn and my flowers. Didn't respond to yelling and clapping so I had to shoo her away until next time. This is a not-so-funny newbie weed example. My father found some Chinese Forget-Me-Not seeds in his car which were within package date. I sowed them in bare spot at top of driveway just for a little throwaway color. Green starts sprouting and I keep watering seedlings for a few weeks. As I'm cutting back baby vine foliage around seedlings one evening my father tells me they look like weeds. I say, couldn't be...denial. Finally I take a stem and compare it to the weeds I've been pulling out of the Bearded Iris for weeks. Yup...same weeds instead of Chinese-Forget-Me-Nots. It's combination Quack grass & "Nimblewill" far as I can tell. Yank some more and still a bare spot at top of driveway since 4 legged critters ate every single Cosmos seedling I planted there three times. Direct sowed some seeds but birds got them. I have tons of mulch on everything but I have the sinking feeling I'm not going to fully understand the meaning of rampant selfseeding and weed seeds breaking dormancy until NEXT year...LOL. Those cute little kidney shaped leaves I thought were some kind of wild ginger were correctly identified for me by someone on a forum as Garlic Mustard. In Spring I hand pulled them from one side of the house for 7 hours. They'd overwintered as cute little "ginger leaves" and grew into upright weeds with white flowers but I never made the connection. Have to pull and put in garbage because seeds still viable if just dumped in woods or composted. Now it's all over the place moving further and further along although Rutgers Extension weed ID site says it's "not yet a problem in cropping areas." The seed cycle is 5-7 years for eradication! How about the way all these aggressive weeds have destroyed the understory of woods and allowed other weeds to take their place instead of natives? The side of house where I pulled all upright Garlic Mustard is now covered in some other upright weed that's not Pokeweed but I can't identify it. Some other Jersey girl asked for identification on another forum but I don't think it's been identfied yet. Well, since I've been checking forums I've delayed by well over an hour watering all those darn containers that were my alternative to making any more new beds in cement clay and seedlings still needing attention. Besides, I think I've used up my "whoa is me" whining quotient for the day! :)

Image is too small. However you can apply a per-emergent herbicide such as XL or Amaze mid-Feb., mid-May and mid- September to prevent them germinating in the first place. Here is a link that might be useful: XL

I agree with Kim. You're creating more work for yourself when you have to remove this barrier. Removing it also exposes seeds that may then sprout. If you smother with an organic layer, (which can usually be found for FREE,) you can leave it in place and pierce only when/where you want to plant. Putting gravel in planting beds is something you'll eventually regret. Do you need more effective borders? Thicker mulch? Why do you have a weed problem? Mow with the outflow going away from planting beds, especially if the grass may have set some seeds. If I didn't spend a few minutes per week pulling sprouts and making sure grass isn't infiltrating borders, I would have infestations of several kinds of weeds and grass in a very short time. It really is easier to pull them out often while they're very small and not well-rooted, before they become a problem.