Presumably you're putting mulch over top to cover this mat? The staples are good to hold it from moving while you mulch, but once that's done, you could theoretically pull them out as you go. Unless you're on a very steep slope where it might creep. Then you don't have to worry about them.

I'm not that fond of weed mat either. Eventually soil forms on top and weeds grow anyway.

rgreen48, Why did you have to tear it out?

toxcrusadr, Couldn't one go without soil or mulch over it and sweep it out of debris with a gentle broom in the fall? The Dewitt Pro-5 is their heaviest landscape weed mat and it is my understanding that a mulch cover is not needed to prevent weeds. It is said to even prevent sumac from sprouting through it.

You could do that If you are happy to be looking at plastic all year round. You'd need to brush it off regularly, not just in fall.

You need to tear it out because it restricts any further planting if left in place. And if you have plants that like to self-seed or you encourage to self sow, a weed fabric/landscape cloth prevents that.

You will find very few serious gardeners - same with horticulturists - that support the use of weed fabric. And even most landscape contractors restrict its use to just an underlayment for hardscaping. It just seems to create far more problems than it solves. And I have yet to see any weed fabric - even professional grade products - stop determined weed growth. YMMV

My dog’s Invisible Fence flags are now little rusty spears that I have to avoid when barefoot in the yard. I would never (again) put anything in the soil that can pierce flesh, and I try not to add to plastic pollution, which means buying and using as little plastic as I can. You can get decent weed barriers that aren’t made from plastic. For instance, I had to throw my grandmother’s oriental rug out a second story window the other day and it landed in my garden. I think I may drag it up to the leach field for a few years doing weed duty.

>> I had to throw my grandmother’s oriental rug out a second story window

I detect a story here...it sounds like a clue in a Sherlock Holmes mystery. "Yes Inspector, we found the rug just as you see it, right here in the garden. Landed smack on the petunias, I dare say...No sir, we have no explanation whatsoever."

“You can see, sir, that it missed that bee hive by mere centimeters. I wonder, was that intentional or a numbskull’s happy accident?”

Yup, it’s another cautionary tale. I should write them down. It was a lot like an amuck biology experiment. I had a few moths show up in my home last fall. In the beginning, I kind of marveled that they really only seemed moderately interested in the dog’s kibble and the bird seed I kept in the house. They didn’t touch any of the dry goods in my cupboard. Last week, I took the lovely sweater that my niece gave me for my birthday last year to the dry cleaner. I’d misplaced it last winter, after wearing it twice, and recently found it. I was making sure that the dry cleaner knew that it was nice wool, when I unfolded it to reveal a cashmere version of Swiss cheese. I went home and found almost no woolens unscathed that weren’t in drawers. I went into the living room the other day, a room I’ve barely gone in since my mother died two years ago and started vacuuming that rug. To my utter amazement, the wool completely disappeared with every swath of the vacuum. I flipped a corner of the rug over and a bunch of moths flew up. Under the rug are living and dead remnants of the entire life cycle of the common clothes moth. The large rug is COMPLETELY destroyed and I didn’t want to drag it, with all its life stages, through my house, so I rolled it up, opened the window two stories above my garden, removed the screen, and let her fly, holding my breath as, at the last second, my vision brought my bee hive below into focus.

iowariver, When I bought my house, it was landscaped with shrubs in front of the windows on either side of my roofed porch. The shrubs that were planted were not varieties that would stay small without A LOT of maintenance. They were chosen for their look, without any consideration of whether they were appropriate for the space (it would have been easy for them to have gotten the same look with a better variety choice.)

When they planted the shrubs, they also put down landscape fabric. When I got tired of maintaining the shrubs, and was putting in garden beds, I took the opportunity to remove the shrubs to make room for herb beds and fig bushes. The fabric had been down for probably 5 - 10 years. As mentioned above, not only had the shrub roots grown through it, so too did weeds grow through, and on top of the fabric. There was a lot of work to remove the shrub, but the fabric made the job horrible. It wouldn't just lift up because root fibers were holding it down, and every time I tried to put a shovel into the ground, or swing the pick axe, that fabric made the job 10 times harder than it should have been.

Now I just use wood chips. They look good, improve the soil, suppress weed growth, and if I want to do maintenance on the area, I just rake back the chips and do what I need.

annpat, so sorry to hear, but your story is hilarious and well written. At least it wasn't an invasion of planaria!

The only time weed fabric does much good is the minute you put it down. Any short term benefit is not worth the pain years later when you have to remove some or all of it. Better to pull a few weeds from your newly tilled soil with lovely thick wood chip mulch over the top than endure the suffering later.

annpat - our clothes moths have impeccable taste (no pun intended). They will always start with anything cashmere, move on to mohair, then lambswool and finally, when all else fails plain old wool jumpers and carpets. Drawers and cupboard doors are no barrier. And they always seem to make their first hole right in the middle of the bosom. I've tried covering the holes with large brooches but it's not satisfactory.

When we mucked out DS's room to redecorate and turn it into a half way acceptable guest space we found an entire moth empire under his bed. That carpet had to go. We replaced with a cheaper synthetic fibre - a thing we had always shunned. But moths can't eat plastic. Not yet anyway but I bet they're evolving....

Seriously, have you tried sticky pheromone traps? It's very satisfying counting the corpses.

Weed fabric is a terrible idea. Whoever has to deal with it in the future will curse your name. Or you will curse yourself.

If you really want a surface that will not grow any weeds and that you can sweep, you should pave the area with permeable paving. I'm serious. If you want a planting area to have a tree in it and nothing else, pave it instead and provide a decent tree well for the tree.

Soil with weed fabric over it is the worst of both worlds, and ultimately does nothing but encourage weeds while harming your desired plants.

Flora, I’m laughing at your brooch comment. I wore one of the damaged...jumpers...the other day, but it required me draping my right hand over the hole on my left forearm when I thought anyone was looking. It was a pain to remember and I looked ridiculous. I have had a lifetime issue with killing things, but times were desperate so, I bought the “sticky” pheromone traps. I don’t think I understood exactly how they worked, because I was horrified to walk past the trap that first week to see moths, still living, with their different, unstuck body parts waving in the air. I grabbed a Kleenex to squish them out of their misery individually, so I could spare the trap, and ended up with trap, Kleenex and corpses all stuck to me. I now have a little plastic toothpick that I kill them with. These moths have an interesting defense, and body structure. If you try to squash them against something, a hallway wall, say, they drop like a stone, straight to the ground. If they escape twice, I let them live, but I warn them, “You won’t be so lucky next time.” The problem is severe, an infestation, affecting three stories. I don’t know what to do. I bought moth balls yesterday, but I haven’t decided if I should use them. I have an upright freezer in the basement. It has a box of blueberries on the top shelf and every other shelf has stacks of gloves, scarves, mittens and sweaters. Short of bombing the house, I don’t see how I can win this battle.

Those sound like different moths, Annpat. Ours are tiny, about 1/4 inch long, and would be impossible to impale on a toothpick. If you squash them they deliquesce into a smudge of silvery dust. I'm enjoying imagining your woolly freezer.

No, they’re the same moths. I don’t impale. I inspect the little glue traps and If I see a waving antennae or still moving limb, I squish the moth’s head with the toothpick. Because I’m kind.

Guess what’s on my Facebook page this morning? A yahoo ad asking me if I’m looking for an Oriental rug! I only mentioned my rug here, not on Facebook where I care what people think of me.

Big Brother is watching.

Keep using those traps and make sure every scrap of potential food is sequestered. It's only a matter of time. We had a terrible infestation of the little pantry moths last year. I save stale bread and stuff in the summer to make suet blocks for the birds in the winter, and they got into ziplok bags FULL of that stuff in the basement when we weren't watching, in the summer. Took months to finally kill them all. But the pheromone traps worked wonders. It just took awhile.

OTOH the bomb doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Sometimes you just have to go nuclear.

Tox, do you think pantry moths are the same as wool moths? I did find a plastic bag with oat bran in it that was perforated and entered. I have about 8 pheromone traps always going, and some are more popular than others. I remembered the other day that I had an infestation another time and it ended when I had the house woodwork polyurethaned. I have some other projects that need polyurethaning, so I may do them before I open the mothballs or set off bombs. There's not much left the moths can destroy wool-wise. Just the stuff that I got in the freezer in time.

I don't know but I don't think they are the same. The few times I've had a moth in a closet getting after wool, it was much larger than the pantry moths. That's just my experience here in the Midwest.

I could swear I'd addressed the clothes moth vs pantry moth question. Maybe I didn't press submit. They are not the same. Clothes moths only eat stuff of animal origin eg wool, silk, fur. They don't eat oats, flour etc. .

Moths eat oats and does eat oats

But wooly moths eat skivvies

Does that about cover it?

Yes, I think it's just coincidence that I've found them in the dog food and flour bin. I do think, though, that they ate all the glue from an old side table in that living room, which is now mostly dismantled, both front legs collapsed on the floor, all the table skirtings fallen on the floor, a glass lamp that is supposed to go to my brother almost sliding down the slope. Speaking of old things, this is a wonderful time to bring up that I touched Jimi Hendrix fifty years ago yesterday in a stairwell off the Lewiston Armory stage---just me, Gretchen Allen, and the band. My brother would have killed me if that lamp had gotten broken. Admission: $3

$3 for a Hendrix concert. What would that be today adjusted for inflation? (and yes, you were one fortunate so-and-so)

Not a fan of the metal staples. They do grow legs and find themselves in my mower or tiller. Trying a degradable stake this year, but I usually weigh fabric down with log rounds or brush too big for the chipper.

However, the tangled mess of drip tape and weed fabric i had after the bomb cyclone are making me rethink it all.

Old furniture glue does fail. My girlfriend had a nice Craftsman style white oak library table for a desk when I met her, and it was skewing over to one side because of loose glue joints. I knocked it apart, got some clamps and glued it all back together. She still uses it today, 30 years later. I was handy so she kept me around too. :-]

That ticket is $22 today according to the CPI Inflation Calculator.