I used it this year because I knew I was going to be in Hawaii for 2 weeks and didn't want my older house sitter having to be weeding the whole 2 weeks (I also planted a month late so she wouldn't have to process a bunch of stuff. We have a long growing season!)

It was great for a one season thing to keep down the weeds and keep the cats out of the beds. Normally I use cardboard to cover the un used summer beds during the winter.

Actually, the stuff worked great! But now that the plants have grown so big, the stuff has torn and broken down.

I'm all for using it in raised beds and getting it from freecycle, then removing it and covering it with cardboard for the winter! ;) Nancy

the stuff I am using is UV treated and more durable than that you see in big box stores. A local nursery uses it and I believe they are going on 8 years of year round use. As for rolling and unrolling, that's a heck of a lot easier than that much hoeing. Mulching became impractical a couple thousand square feet ago, and I'm not concerned about the unlikely clogged weave because I lay drip tape with it.

So true.

In the pic that theparsely shows above, the soil is unimproved due to the shielding of the weed mat. If theparsley were to leave it there, in several years time that soil would look just the same.

And the roots. They will not head down as they should. They surface root, directly under the weed mat, in their search FOR (not from) oxygen and other good things.

I'd gladly use newspaper or cardboard instead, but I cant find enough to cover an acre every year. As for my weed fabric being on this planet longer than me-I sure hope so. That crap ain't cheap.

Omg it's the worst. I bought my house from an elderly woman who had once been an avid gardener, but who had obviously not touched the yard in many years. Not only is the soil destroyed from her intense weed cloth use (with 7 inches of dirt vines and weeds anchoring it to the ground) but it's trapped in the bases of all the trees and there are crazy pockets without any soil around all the roots. The trees have grown over/ around it and I've had to cut pieces out. It's insane.

I feel your pain. I look forward to the day when I can go out to plant or transplant something and not have to take a big pair of scissors and a box cutter with me.

I took out a huge shrub last year planted by the people who previously owned the house. It wasn't a bad shrub, but needed constant pruning, and well, I prefer edibles. I took it out and replaced it with 2 figs and an herb garden. Little did I realize that they had used weedcloth. What a pain! The roots and the plant had grown through it and shredded it badly. It had a plastic/vinyl type layer on top, and a cottony-polyester layer adhered to the underside. I had to basically sift through every shovel of dirt in an 8' x 16' area. Never will I use that awful stuff in such a circumstance.

Yes, seeing is believing.

Agree completely. I am far happier with a very thick layer of ground leaves (though I'll sometimes use some cardboard or newspapers underneath). I have not had a significant weed problem in years. Weed block fabric is the worst stuff I can imagine.

A good, composted, native mulch will always outperform weed block as long as you don't skimp on the application. I hate the thought of all the old weed block under our soils. Here's a good picture of a proper mulch installation. http://www.spvsoils.com/mulch

You know what else is really, really awful? Rock mulch. Rock mulch over weed cloth is like the perfect soil-stifling combination. Oh, and someone went over it with some bark nugget mulch at some point, too.

I pulled out almost all of the weed cloth (as much of it as I can get at for now, anyway) but I've only been able to remove the lava rock mulch bit by bit, and I'm sure the smaller buried rocks will be turning up in the garden basically forever. Just ground through another couple buckets of rock mulch, finally worked out a way to separate the rock from everything else: by dunking it in a compost sieve in a big pan of water so that the pieces of bark mulch float to the top, and the dirt, rock dust and random OM mixed with it filters to the bottom. Geez. At least organic mulch disappears on its own, eventually.

The timing of this thread is great, given I am experimenting with a woven poly weed fabric this year. It has been impossible to get enough leaves, cardboard or woodchips to keep the weeds at bay.

Just as my naturally contrarian nature paid off with Netflix stock this week, my weed fabric experiment is paying off.

So far, I have no weed pressure in my test rows. The soil beneath is more uniformly moist than either leaf or woodchip mulch rows. A light rain gets to the soil, instead of being absorbed by the woodchips, and it doesn't evaporate quickly.

Sure, if I let it get covered with soil and organic material and things grow ON it, I'll probably be cussing.

It's a tool. Like any tool, you need to pick the right tool for your particular application and use that tool appropriately.

Well, I do think you're talking about a very different application than I am. Most everyone complaining about weed cloth here is dealing with it in landscape beds where it's been "permanently" installed. Between row crops in an intensively managed vegetable garden as a temporary (and readily removable) measure is something else. (Back in the day people used to use black plastic "mulch" for that, and I suppose some people still do.)

Using weed cloth in the landscape is pretty much the worst of both worlds. It compromises all the ways nature *wants* to work with you to improve plant and soil health, and it obstructs your ability to make changes in the landscape over time as plants grow (or fail) and conditions shift. And while promising to make your landscape "lower maintenance," it actually makes ordinary light maintenance substantially more difficult over time.

BTW, does anyone have a creative use for a huge tub of ugly reddish lava rock mulch? Free to a good home!

I have a couple rows of the plastic. Its quite a bit cheaper, but thinner , harder to work with, less durable, and not permeable so its tricky to keep rain from running off. Even though I have drip tape, I like the rain to permeate.

Ive heard some folks use crushed lava rock in potting mix, but I have no firsthand knowledge.

Yeah, these rocks are more the size of avocado pits or a little bigger. On-site rock crushing is probably not practical for me to attempt.

The first garden I ever owned had been mulched with black plastic and white pebbles. The previous owner was very proud of it. My brother and I removed all that. A really awful job. The roots of the fruit trees were all growing directly under the black plastic on soil that looked like that of theparsley's first photo.

Years later I owned a different place. It took me a fair time to realise that the previous owner had used weed mat under the mulch. (In some places.) A disappointing discovery.

And its true that when weed mat is used as a permanent weed supressent... supressant... to suppress weeds, somehow the soil, the roots, the weeds, end up in it and through it and it's very hard to deal with. (Harder than the black plastic.) I'm still in the process of getting rid of it. No pebbles thank goodness, and no rocks. No congealed lava. But still, a very difficult situation. And it's not like the plants like this set-up. It explains why some are looking rather forlorn.

Thank goodness he didn't do it everywhere. (There are places where he planted many daffodils, so he left that alone. I love them.)

I believe that as permanent additions, there is no place for black plastic or weed mat.

theparsley....you can try freecycle. NT

I have made paths by my work area with the rocks I have dug up, also piles of rock for the snakes (Eastern brown snakes, nothing dire) to hide in. If you have a porch or deck, throw them underneath so they are out of sight.

Hmm. I don't have any spare space in my patio/garden (the garden is 7 feet x 7 feet and fenced) but there is a kind of no man's land behind the fence, a passageway between my row of row houses and the one behind. Maybe I can sneak a rock pile somewhere out there. (I do have a small brown snake nearby - it was quite indignant when I disturbed it under a pile of branches. Thought for a second it was a really big worm!)

I had a garter snake that spent the summer in one of my 5 gal buckets. Not sure if he ever came out. There was water in it and I think he was living on skeeters. He just disappeared at the end on the season.

The bucket wasn't far from a rock pile made of rocks far to large to walk on but home to chipmunks and field mice for sure. Oh now I get it. I don't think he was big enuff to eat them but ya just neva know.

When I was picking out the old rock mulch/weed fabric problem, I would use the rocks under the spigots for my rain barrels and in other places where I wanted nothing to ever grow - but I still didn't use landscape fabric.

I totally agree, but It's not completely useless. I season my compost on it. When I dump a batch out of the spinner bin, it's quite sludgy, so I pile it on the ground onto a sheet of weed cloth and then cover with a plastic tarp and leave it for 3-6 months. Worms and bugs still find it but roots can't come up through.

I've also used it just as a border around certain beds where I know I will be changing the mulch each year anyway - though a strip of cardboard or a thick layer of folded newspaper is just as effective for that purpose.

I've cut down the spindly, twiggy, ugly little purple leaf plum from my garden bed and chopped and dropped the twigs and leaves over the formerly weed-cloth-covered area. Today, my two most stalwart assistants came with me out to the city composting facility in Fairmount Park, and we collected a 15 gallon bin full of compost and another of wood chip mulch. I've spread a good layer of the compost over the formerly weed-cloth-covered area of the bed and am now awaiting a thunderstorm that's about to sweep in and water it well. I'm looking forward to a more workable soil soon.

I'd like to do some fall planting in the bed, but the removal of the piled-up rock mulch revealed another problem - where the rock mulch had been piled against the bottom of the wood fence, the fence is eaten away all along the bottom of the palings. I dunno whether it was termites or anything specific, but it could have been just general decomposition over the years from the moisture trapped there. It looks like hell. I already knew I had to replace the gate in the fence but now it looks like the whole fence needs to be replaced, which is a Conversation that needs to happen with the condo association. I hope I can get the work done in the fall, but it might make the timing of any fall planting tricky.

' ... it could have been just general decomposition over the years from the moisture trapped there.'

That's what it will be.

I'm using heavy-grade weed cloth in my wide-row vegetable garden. It's down permanently on the paths, and on the rows I laboriously lift it between crops to amend the soil. It's working great. I love it.

That's not to say that it's free of issues:

- I violate the warranty by not mulching over it, so there's no telling how long it will last. But I'm on the third year for some of it and it's still fine and sturdy and grumpily resists my scissors when I cut it.

- Cutting it. I rarely want to amend an entire row at once, so I cut through enough to free a section of a row, and then I have to patch it or weeds will come up through the cut.

- Securing and lifting it. A small sledgehammer for pounding in ground staples, and a pair of pliers for pulling them out, are a standard part of my garden toolkit.

- Plant spacing. If I cut holes too close together, the fabric is useless. So I have to play games with spacing, such as planting three or four onions per hole.

- Crops that really want to grow in bare dirt. For some of them, I come up with weird schemes. For others, I just don't grow the things.

- I can't use solid fertilizer while the crop is growing; I can only use it during soil prep when the fabric is lifted. For nitrogen, I can use fish emulsion; for the other nutrients, I just over-fertilize a bit when I amend, and hope. So far, hope has worked OK. I also had big plans for a mass application of greensand and rock phosphate, and then I couldn't get greensand. Hmph.

- It's fairly unattractive.

- It's expensive. When it does start to rot and tear, I'll have a better idea whether it financially makes sense. Will I be amortizing it over three years or ten?

What could possibly make this worth it?

I don't weed.

I just don't. It is what it is, I am what I am.

I tried denying this truth about myself for years, but it is a truth, and my weed-cloth-covered garden is the most successful vegetable garden I've ever had. It means that the vast majority of my gardening happens when it's convenient for me. I can't delay it forever, but if I abandon the garden for three weeks, I just beg a friend to pick beans for themselves, and the garden chugs along contentedly without me. There is no weedy punishment when I get back.

I love it.

M Wilson-glad to hear someone else is pleased with what I am trying out for the first time this year. I think I have decided on log rounds to weigh it down. It should be easy to pull back a section as needed. Plus I think I am going to fold it up at the end of the summer. That way, I can add amendments or grow a cover ctop. Crabgrass is my biggest problem and really only in the warm months.

I use weed cloth to line sunken pots. Although it stops worms, it does prevent the plant roots from growing into the soil. Plants do not spend all that much time in the pots anyway.

M WIlson: I'm using heavy-grade weed cloth in my wide-row vegetable garden. It's
down permanently on the paths, and on the rows I laboriously lift it
between crops to amend the soil. It's working great. I love it.

I grow thyme on my walk ways...... Good for cooking and it smells nicer too when I walk on it. Bees love it. Can you say anything like that about weed cloth?

Re: "Can you say anything like that about weed cloth?"

Hey, I'm not commanding anyone else to use weed cloth. But thyme would need some weeding. And I won't do it. I'd want to do it, I'd plan to do it, and I wouldn't do it.

Maybe it would be easier just to pave the paths?

Easier than the thyme or the weed cloth?

Either way, the issue of weeding the beds would remain.

Ok, no weed cloth, but what do I use on a steep hillside near the woods, but the first thing people see when they come in? I have tried to keep it weed free, but that is a challenge due to the slope and how well weeds grow.

What is there already? Can you (did you) post a pic? What do you want there?

I have seen a low and spreading evergreen shrub with wood chips for mulch. Wood chips kill off weed because they are poisonous to plants which is why you do not put wood chips on your flower gardens.

You could make a small bed along the front border for flowers and it will be much easier to maintain.

No garden,even that which has weed cloth is care free.

emerogork,

Since you asked... lol. The first part is tolerable to weed and I am able to maintain it. The second portion is so steep that I need to use the shovel to keep my balance when I weed. So you can see why it is so filled with the weeds. We spent 2 weeks this spring removing the weeds, their roots and the multiflora rose that make it like barbed wire. We laid down the wood chips from the spring tree trimming, a truck load full. We planted the oak, in order to try to have more shade there and something more interesting than a steep hillside. All of the other oaks I planted at the same time are thriving. I also included a picture of the soil since this is the soil forum. It is 6.3ph and considered fertile.

"Wood chips kill off weed because they are poisonous to plants which is why you do not put wood chips on your flower gardens." False!

I am interested. Can you list some of the plants that you have/want in the area? Do you know what weeds are in there? Have you found any pictures, professionally maintained even, that reflect your idea?

Do your neighbors have any thing similar as the terrain may not be all that different. What did they do?

How dense is that wooded area in the back? Even if it breaks to a neighbor's yard, maybe you can adopt a woods-to-bed progression which would allow weeds. You can almost let it go and see what develops over time.

OTOH, Sometimes there are nice things to say about weeds. After giving up on watering, fertilizing, insecticides, herbicides, I now have the greenest lawn in the neighborhood (a secret is miniature clover that grew there naturally.). I listen to crickets, katydids cicada and things that go click in the night again.

I have seen preying mantids, humming birds and an increasing number of butterflies. Sure, not all credited to weeds, but a more natural garden has its benefits.

This is in contrast to the rest of the neighborhood. They have greatly reduced gardens for more chemically based lawns, Chopped down 60 year old maples that used to shade the houses in the heat of summer. and have beds cleanly covered with wood chips. Did you know that most wood chips, even the "cedar" ones are chopped/shredded wood pallets and stained with who knows what?)

BTW: The weed barrier will remain in place almost for ever but natural mulch such as leaves, will accumulate and create a weed bed on top of the weed cloth.

Was it not Dr. Strangelove's gardener that said: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and love the Weeds.

ahh you temp me ! on wish list Bearberry, chokeberry, American holly, perhaps a leucothoe, a paxistimia, if I could I would love to have one of the magnolia accumita seedlings grow there. Alas the only things that grow there other than wild mustard, and another weed that has nestle burrs and is six feet tall, are hostas and they seem to survive even the deer there. I have no idea why. If you can see even the oak tree died despite care. I would even be happy if I could encourage tree growth here.

This is the woods edge. We have almost 3 acres of woods with 65 protected acres behind. The menagerie is alive and well on my property, but I would still prefer that the entry area looks tended. I am working on creating a meadow in a former horse paddock so we are doing all of our part for nature.

Also we are fighting a terrible battle with invasives in the woods and if we do not take great care they will return here including the multiflora rose and the Japanese knotweed, so although I might prefer gentle neglect, it is not really an option.

this photo is some idea of the order I would like there

I don't know the plants that you would like to have there, but why not try this:

Decide on the exact spot where you would like a (for example) Bearberry. Procure said Bearberry. Then remove the weed growth from that area only - perhaps an area of a square metre or less - and plant the Bearberry. Then do the same thing for all the other things you want.

Weeds grow in places because they are suited to that place. Why not allow them to assist us rather than think of them as intruders? Not that you think that way, but many do. They do a lot of good. And as someone above said, they give themselves freely for our compost when we need some green stuff.

I think such an area that you have, seydoux, sounds like a fun place to work with. And beautiful too.

Seydoux, I admire your ambition. How many years do you have? (:

I
did something like this and it took me 10 years. Granted I paid it
with a lot of procrastination. One thing I learned is that, like rust,
weeds never sleep.

OK, now for something constructive..
Philosophy
of weeds: A plant that goes to seed this year will produce seeds that
germinate over years. Many next year, fewer the following year, an so
on. Turning up the soil, even the act of weeding, will bring more seeds
o the surface and they will then grow. This is one reason why
roto-tilling is the worst thing you can do to an annual fruit vegetable
garden. Hmmm, I though I was supposed to say something constructive.
Hold on, I will think of something...

Ok, how about give up and purchase silk flowers... No, no, no that is not it...
(I have a neighbor that does that, he cycles then according to when they are naturally in bloom)

You might consider building a stepping/stair diagonally through the bed. It will help you navigate for maintenance. How about a water feature? Water fall, babbling brook? You can get kits at the big box stores. You can find used swimming pool pumps on Craig's list. Hey, I am on a roll (Maybe it is a bagel).

I think that if you section it off, 5' x 5' at a time from the side most visible, you will find it manageable and can help keep you motivated. Next year, do another 5'x5' section.

I have heard that if you decapitate a weed often, the more you weaken the roots because they cannot get nutrition for chlorophyll production. If you do not mind a but of chemical use: For particularly persistent plants, gather it into a cone, place a plastic bag to protect other plants and spray it with round up.

I ramble....

Keep us posted with your progress. I am sure that many will help you stay on task.

Aldi grocery stores always have tons of cardboard boxes for customers, & you also can take boxes off the shelves after putting the contents of one half-empty box into another half-empty box of the same item.

I always get a ton of boxes there; they're good for weed suppression, carbon for the compost, containers for people to use when they take home plants from the garden, food dishes for the neighbor's cat.

I also have gotten cardboard from dollar stores on the days that they stock, & I've wanted to, but never have, dumpster dived at a liquor store!

For weed suppression, use lots of layers & lots of overlap, & if they're too hard to break down, get them damp.

Cardboard boxes won't outlast me, & they're free.

I used to know someone who was manager for a company that made shipping boxes. I once commented about "cardboard boxes" that he made. He adamantly corrected me and said that a cardboard box is what makes the the box for dry cereal and gable-top orange containers.. He manufactures Corrugated paper boxes. I never made that mistake again and enjoy asking for a "corrugated paper box" now and again at the store just to see the confusion.

I had my first experience using corrugated paper as a weed barrier. Last fall I cleared a 18" stretch along the lawn at the top of a low retaining wall. The idea was to plant creeping phlox. A single layer of splayed boxes from Amazon fit the bill very well. I covered it with mulch.

After a very mild winter, there were few few weeds but there was absolutely no evidence of the barrier except for some tape that was on the boxes. Maybe it needed several layers. Maybe the moles, chipmunks and other rodentia enjoyed it.

As is often discussed over on the Vermicomposting forum :-) worms love, er, whatever you ought to call the corrugated brown stuff. Cardboard on the soil is well known as a worm-attracting device, and shredded cardboard in the worm bin works well as both bedding and food source. According to my best information, the glue used to stick the layers together is generally made of cornstarch, which worms really glom onto as a nice energy-rich food source. Add that to the fact that a layer of cardboard on the soil helps maintain a nice moist condition directly underneath it, and I think you might attribute the vanishing of your cardboard mulch to some very happy worms.

I'm all for cardboard, and use what I can find. This year, I covered 3000 square feet with it. But, there is big money in recycling it, so it's hard for me to find. I used to be able to "find" 80 -100 pound bales of cardboard but a recent renovation to that place included a locked dumpster area.

Those of us working at a smaller scale are less likely to have a problem finding cardboard! All I'd have to do is walk down my block on trash day and take my pick of the Amazon shipping boxes and other box types set out for recycling.

Thanks emerogork,

I have said that I am leaving her feet first so I guess I have whatever time God gives me. We have 6 acres so I need it. I have managed to tame the back yard area, and I started on this area this year. The problem is that the only thing that seems to grow here are weeds and they are ones like wild garlic and my favorite Virginia stickseed to which I am allergic. I have at least eliminated the multiflora rose here. Truthfully, I would love to bring the treeline down here but like that poor oak, it all seems to die. if any of you can hazard a guess about that I would appreciate it. So suggestions for hardy trees would be appreciated.

I may have seen every thing now,....

For those that still believe in "weed cloth".
My neighbor used it and has been gloating about weed free beds. Nutsedge (not grass) grows right through it. It can even pierce asphalt! After it is grows through, anything else can grow through the hole... His "weed barrier" isn't....

A brief update on my formerly weed-clothed patio garden:

Ever since taking out the lava rock mulch and pulling up the weed cloth on the back of the garden bed back in July, I've been putting down layer after layer of whatever organic matter or compost I can make, beg, borrow or steal, including: free compost and wood chip mulch from the city yard; trimmings and clippings from the garden; leaves swept off the sidewalk and out of the gutter (including some I brought from my sister's house after we cleaned up her sidewalk); coffee grounds; and my own homemade vermicompost, now that my worm bin is ramping up to full production.

I have done absolutely no digging or tilling, although the squirrels have lately been insanely busy burying nuts in the garden, digging up and stealing each other's nuts, scolding each other, scolding me when I come out my back door, and re-digging after I go out and rake it over. Not very deep tilling, but it's free as well as entertaining. I like to mess with their heads by pretending to steal their nuts after I've interrupted their digging. Squirrel fury!

Anyway, I did dig a test hole and found that the first couple inches of soil are now everything you'd want to see - crumbly, dark, full of OM - with the clay layer below beginning to darken up. Worm activity is good. The real test will be adding new plantings in the spring and seeing how they do over the next growing season.

I love making soil. I love it even more when someone else is doing most of the work for me.

I'm itching to start some spring planting in my tiny garden, but it's technically still a bit early (our last frost date is supposed to be around the 18th or so, but these days who even knows) and I'm impatiently waiting for the contractors to show up and replace my rotted fence before I can do any planting in the back half where the pile of rock mulch over weed cloth used to be. The fence would have rotted anyway, but the bottom of it was completely eaten away where the rock mulch was piled against it.

I have already put down a tiny new tree (Amelanchier x "Autumn Brilliance") which arrived bare root and needed to go in the ground ASAP, but it's not next to the fence, so it should be fine as long as the fence guys don't step on the 18 inch high forked stick which, seen with my eye of faith, is already a handsome small patio tree. The tree went in the spot where the old, scrawny, unhealthy cherry plum used to be, where I have been piling vermicompost and leaves ever since last summer. I didn't amend the planting hole at all - just dug and filled in. Enough leaf mold and vermicompost just fell into the hole to make me feel fine about the start my new tree's roots are getting.

Anyway, the "someone else" who is working for me outside is a healthy passel of earthworms, which I can see out there every time I pull back last autumn's leaf mulch, which I diligently collected from the sidewalk in front of my row house and brought out back. Even if I can't set to work yet, I like knowing that they're hard at it. I've seen some of my red wigglers who rode out from my indoor worm bin, and at least three separate species of native earthworms: slow gray short guys, some really huge red nightcrawler types, and a longer, thinner, super-active wiggly worm that's new to me.

I've also scattered out some seeds and grains for the sparrows and squirrels, inspired by some videos of composting chickens I've watched on Youtube: so there's been lots of pecking and scratching and digging going on in the layer of leaves, which is both fun to watch and will serve to further shred down the leaves for incorporation in the soil.

When I do get to the planting along the back fence, I'll try to remember to post a soil pic as a "before and after" to the one at the start of this topic.

Hey! This thread woke up!

I'm starting my third year of using weed cloth over my 70 X 70 vegetable garden. (This is the first year that has started with almost the entire garden covered.) For me, lifting the fabric, amending the soil, returning the fabric, and planting through small holes or drills in the fabric is working very well--and the earthworms seem pretty content under there.

The primary remaining care issue is finding a thoroughly satisfactory organic liquid fertilizer that will allow me to fertilize during the growing season without a buildup of goo on the fabric.

The primary remaining mystery is how many years the weed cloth will last--since I'm not mulching over it, I'm violating the warranty so I don't know what to expect. If it lasts five years, that depreciates out to a perfectly reasonable cost per growable-square-foot-year.

The primary remaining infrastructure issue is finding a better way to secure the cloth. Plopping heavy things on it hasn't worked; the wind still moves the fabric. I'm still using ground staples, which are a pain to pull out and re-insert. My goal is to find some sort of clip, so that I can insert the ground staple permanently and then clip to it. But hundreds of strong, weatherproof, reusable clips is likely to be a pretty painful investment.

I had delusions of using bedding discs on my tractor's toolbar to toss a bit of soil along the edge of the fabric to hold it down. Alas, I overestimated how good a tractor pilot I am and it never quite worked how I imagined. I am back to the staples.