Ooh I'm the first to comment! I've used old carpet in various parts of my garden to kill weeds and keep weeds from encroaching. It's very effective except that it sheds little bits along the edges and eventually weeds to grow through it. I heard it's bad for soil life underneath, but so is landscape fabric and cardboard.

I would not use carpet between roses as I think it will be messy to clean up once it starts disintegrating. I'd put down 3-4 layers of newspaper and top with 3-4 inches of mulch. I'm concerned cardboard wouldn't let enough water through to your roses.

I regularly use cardboard then cover with mulch. it does disintegrate in a single season for me.

i leave room around the base of all my plantings so weeds still show up there but its significantly less- and much less time consuming to clean up.

ive tried the landscaping fabric and while it works a little, its much more difficult to deal with in the garden

ive never tried the carpet method but curious what others think now.

I used carpet in between my raised vegetable beds. It doesn’t decompose and it is FULL of weeds on top of it. I should (have) put more mulch on it. it will be a nightmare to get rid of it. it’s been down for 10 years (?) I wish I’d used something more organic - not a chemical pile of fibre. I do not put carpet anywhere anymore …I use soaked carboard/ newspapers /roll of paper (used under floors from H Dep)

Cardboard works like a charm here but we have very wet winters so there is no problem with the soil getting moisture. The cardboard ecomposes in one year and the earthworms seem to love it. So far cardboard seems fine for supporting healthy soil while suppressing weeds. I always top my cardboard with mulch.

Should note i have very wet winters/early springs as well.

I also sometimes use the brown paper packed in delivery boxes. doesnt last as long as cardboard but it does work for me

I've never used carpet, but I have used soaked cardboard and newspaper. Both became impervious to water, but we were having a long dry spell at the time. I've also used black plastic to try to kill off an area of weeds. Didn't work too well for me. I'd use glysophate in your position, but then I don't have a problem with using it.

I would stick with cardboard. I wish I had used more of it around some plants that sucker. I wanted the suckering and did not want to deter it, but instead got more weeds. The cardboard would have allowed the suckering. Now I hope I can smother some weeds with wood chips.

I wish I would have done it right the first time.

Thank you everyone who contributed to my post, I greatly appreciate the input. After doing lots of internet searching and reading your comments here I am going to try the cardboard. I think we get so much rain here during the winter and spring that my roses will get plenty of water.

Trish I also don’t have much of a problem using roundup over here, I always wear lots of protective clothing and remove and shower right away so my exposure is very limited. The problem is it only works while the weeds are metabolically active so they can take it in and now they are all dormant. I have tried to think of a way of doing after the weeds wake up, but by then my roses also will be awake and I feel it will be harder on them to be moved also.

Sheila you mentioned before how you have planted on top of grass and that is what I have done here from the beginning. I now wish I would have taken the time to prepare my beds properly, but I have always been too impatient and wanted my roses planted yesterday.

Jc our weather is very similar so if you have had no issues with the cardboard I am expecting it to do well here also. Thank you.

Librarian thank you for your comment. I also have a good amount of yearly precipitation and warm weather (maybe 50 inches) so I think the cardboard should decompose also. I do not mind using other less organic materials if I have to, but it seems cardboard or some sort of paper really is the best way.

I apologize for the caps. I typed my message on notes since I can’t type here with my iPhone anymore and half of it was on the tile area in caps.

Gosh, Sheila..."I wish I would have done it right the first time" is one of the main themes of my gardening life!

Landscape fabric ,for me, was a nightmare. The soil beneath starved, weeds grew on it and through it, and it was so difficult to get rid of-I'm still finding pieces of it here and there, years later. Never again. So,I think carpet would be just as bad,unless, of course, one could find carpet made out of 100% natural, bio-degradable materials.Cardboard works well,and earthworms love the interface between wet cardboard and soil. Of course ideally one would always cover it with a thick organic mulch. But in some particularly bad areas that have yet to be cultivated, I have used just the cardboard. If I put it down during a rainy fall/winter, after the soil is already soaked,it's best, but if the area that I'm trying to tame is just weeds anyway, it doesn't matter too much if the soil remains dry underneath it,until I eventually get around to breaking it up with the pick, mixing the cardboard pieces into the soil as organic matter.

I have even used the heavy duty cardboard boxes diapers come in and havent had an issue.

i always get the cheap mulch from lowes that breaks down relatively quickly too

Thank you bart bart I am glad to get all these positive comments on using the cardboard. My area is already very wet since we have had plenty of rain this winter. I am planning on first removing the roses the area, burning the half dead grass with a torch and then doing the cardboard around newly transplanted roses. Hopefully it works.

Jc I am also going to just go buy some regular mulch from lowes and cover the cardboard with it, it will make the bed look finished and hopefully contribute to my soil which is awful to begin with.

I use cardboard here too and it breaks down no problem. Of course, the only time it’s dry around here is summer!

bart bart yes it looks half dead right now. I am not really certain if burning it would be beneficial, I was hoping it helped kill it some more lol. I’ll take a picture of the areas in question when I got outside to day and I would appreciate your advice. It would definitely save me some work if burning is not necessary.

Want to expand passed the pot on the right. Burn or no burn?

I think the cardboard alone would do just as well Dianela. Skip the burn.

Thank you Sheila! I just received the carboard I ordered for the project and I am excited. My next project is trying to figure out what to do with the two florentinas by the window. They are excellent roses here but i dont love the reds. I may be doing a lot of rearranging soon. I saw your florntina growing freestanding and it looks very nice, I may be trying that out.

Totally agree with Sheila!

Exciting to get an expansion! I want to see pictures this Summer! I think cardboard will be perfect in your rainy climate. It wouldn’t work quite as well here in SoCal, since we get just a few days of rain each winter. I just pile on the mulch. I use a super fine mulch that almost looks like compost and it still takes many years to break down. But I have never made a new bed from a grassy area like that.

Stephanie, you can still do so, using cardboard to block out light,if you're just trying to get rid of grass. Since your aim is to kill it off, it doesn't matter if it's dry.

I know you already got your cardboard for your project dianela, but has anyone ever used builders paper? The stuff on rolls that builders use to protect floors etc. Not the pink rosen paper, but the brown stuff. I saw a roll of it in the local paint store and it said right on the roll that it works great for flower beds. I think that is what I will try for my expanded flower bed this spring. My flower bed is quite large so it would take a lot of cardboard, but this on a roll stuff looks pretty easy.

Yes, I have used it. i was trying it out as a suggestion by my neighbour. I doubled it over to make it thicker. I find it easier to manipulate if I have soaked it first (in my wheelbarrow with water in it). I put it down two years ago…this year I will have to add more mulch because the paper is totally decomposed. It was probably decomposed last year, but I wasn’t paying attention. I have a stash of newspaper, which is running out because no one seems to read them any more. I would definitely continue with the roll of paper

Cardboard will last longer.

I got a big roll of cardboard also, just like the paper but thicker so like Sheila mentioned it should last longer. I wish I would have saved my boxes from diapers and stuff but this way there is no tape or other stuff I wouldn’t want in my garden.

Throwing a controversy into the mix! Here's an interesting article. If you're into it, reading all of the comments is a...unique...way to spend a couple hours. Confession: although I read the article AND all of the comments, I have totally used carpet, and paper under mulch, to make new garden spaces. And would do again.

https://gardenprofessors.com/the-cardboard-controversy/ 

I also use cardboard and mulch. It attracts earthworms like crazy.

That was an eye opening article summercloud…Thanks!!

I’ve used carpet as a barrier around my rose garden just to help keep the the bermuda grass at bay and to keep it from sprouting up under my arch. It is by no means pretty but it has really helped. I actually get all sorts of benificals living under it and I do very little to maintain it. Every so often I do have to pull up some grass but the carpet greatly reduces my chores.

Interesting article,summercloud. But, for one thing, it seemed to be talking about a very heavy-duty cardboard. For another,it suggests no alternative. For a project like mine,where I'm attempting to cultivate a very large space of previously un-cultivated land,using cardboard has been an enormous help; it just isn't possible to simply remove the thick, tall , aggressive grass and brambles and then cover with an organic mulch and expect it to work! not to mention that I just don't have an in-exhaustable source of organic mulch that delivers itself to my garden.

I collect cardboard from "dumpsters" on Tuesday evenings (Wednesday morning is when they pick up paper trash),using the large boxes from the pharmacy, the bike store,etc. It does take a while to break down,but it DOES do so,unlike plastic or landscape fabric. As for the earrthworms...well,much of my soil has none. The card-board helps kill off the weeds,retains moisture,and eventually earthworms begin to appear. So, for me at least, the benefits out-weigh any disadvantages.

What's more,this scientist Linda Chalker-Scott, insists that wood chips is the only way to go-a mulch of wood-chips 8-12 inches deep.Well, I tried it, once. I spent 1,000 euros for a truck-load of wood chips.Here in Italy they sure as anything don't just give them away; they are quite expensive. They are also extremely heavy to lug from my entrance gate where the truck dumped them down to my garden.There certainly wasn't enough of them to mulch 8-12 inches deep! It looked nice, for about a month; then the badgers arrived ,and my beautiful,hard-to-do, EXPENSIVE mulch was scattered about to the four winds. I'm certainly not questioning this lady's research,or the validity of her statments,but gardening is not an exact science, lol.

Cardboard sure seems like the lesser of all the evils, tho not perfect... better than lots of weeds and better than landscape paper! Now if I had several yard helpers to pull weeds, I could see doing nothing but mulch, but I don't. Well, not counting my kids.

Also to me it seems earthworms just love being under things, not that they're necessarily trying to get more oxygen.

I've noticed earthworms under leaf mulch just as I've noticed them under cardboard. Cardboard helps claim a new garden area from grass and weeds better than just mulch and my climate is so wet that it's completely gone in less than a year. What I have noticed is seemingly happier soil in areas where we used cardboard as opposed to removing grass (which always means removing soil and grass roots too). The areas that previously had cardboard rather than turf removal have more earthworms and happier seeming plants the following year. My guess is more organic material decomposed. But this is all just observations. I did not conduct a scientific study. I also don't think cardboard would be the same in an arid climate.

At least when I use cardboard for mulch or to create a new bed, I’m usually using a motley collection of boxes of different sizes and shapes - Amazon boxes, shoe boxes, dividers from wine cartons, boxes plants shipped in, etc. These boxes all have different kinds of flaps and vents, and so it’s pretty much impossible to make a complete and solid cover - there are always going to be little cracks where the cardboard doesn’t quite match up that are not covered. Not to mention, most of my beds are curved, and most boxes are square, and so it’s impossible to get them completely under cardboard. And of course, if I’m mulching an existing bed, and trying to fit the cardboard around a plant, I’m certainly not going to get complete coverage. Plus if I’m covering existing weeds or grass, there’s bumps where the cardboard kind of sticks up from the underlying grass or weed, so it does not lie flat against the soil. So it seems to me that all these little cracks and etc. leave plenty of room for air, water, gases, etc to go in and out. It’s really not, in my experience, like you’re talking about an impermeable surface. (Of course, weeds get up through these little cracks, but nothing’s perfect.) If in order to experiment, they used a perfectly flat surface covered perfectly in cardboard, well, that’s just not the reality of the way it actually works, in my experience. (Tbh, it wasn’t clear to me that this was citing a specific experiment with cardboard, though I did not read all the previous posts she referenced, so maybe it was).

Of course it would be ideal to just use beautiful fresh organic wood chips (and have everything perfectly weeded before applying them) but wood chips are heavy and if you have a big area to mulch its a vast amount of hard work to apply it. I don’t have a budget to hire help, so other than the mowing, which DH does, it's just me, and the time I can spend in the garden is limited by my work. So I have to do the best I can, and for me cardboard (topped by straw to cover the less-than-great look of the cardboard) works, and I’ve seen no evidence of any harm. My garden has tons of earthworms and other creatures, all over, including in the soil. And my plants seem to do pretty well. Plus, here in wet NJ, it really does break down pretty fast; maybe in drier climates it would be somewhat different.

I think cardboard is much better suited for wetter climates in terms of healthy happy soil and plants. There is a house in our neighborhood that has a single layer of cardboard covering a small bed in their front side yard near the sidewalk. They put bricks on top of it in a few places to keep it from blowing away. That exact same cardboard was definitely there well before the pandemic started. Probably been 3 years now and it hasn’t degraded at all and still no weeds growing. No plants either though.

That is crazy about the cardboard being there for years. I put a layer down in fall in some spots and it’s already gone

If covered attractively with compost, I would be fine with the cardboard lasting here.

I think this is just one more thing that shows how important location is when it comes to gardening. With our over 50 inches of water annually plus the constant humidity everything degrades faster. Of course that means we also have a HUGE blackspot pressure which is the bane of my existence in the garden. Even the ADR winners like Quicksilver defoliate in my garden. I do think in this case the quick degradation is a positive since it will contribute to my soul instead of inhibiting good organisms like it seems to do in arid areas.

We have been in the 40s and 30s during the day so I haven’t been able to do anything outside. When I manage to create my bed this year I will make a note of the date and monitor to see how long the cardboard lasts here. Hopefully this will give me some data for others in similar locations in the future.

I thought people put cardboard down with mukch on top as a way of initially supressing weeds. Eventually the cardboard will disintegrate, but that won’t matter as long as the bed continues to be mulched…?

Gargamel, yes I think that is the intent, but in very dry climates cardboard lasts many years and might not be as healthy for the soil if it doesn’t break down readily. In my arid climate, 3 inches of a very fine mulch is all that is needed to initially suppress weeds and then I refresh the bed with an inch each year. If the mulch isn’t very very fine then it never breaks down. A few random chunks of wood that are about an inch thick are occasionally found in my mulch bags and they tend to migrate to the surface and get scraped up and thrown out with the fall leaves that will also never breakdown unless I bury them.