This is actually a solution we came up with a few years ago ourselves when, after years of working in our backyard garden, we discovered the benefits of this item! Read more about it below. It might surprise you!
There’s a nursery I love located between Ocala and Gainesville called Taylor Gardens Nursery. Their plants are nicely lined up on this really tough woven landscape plastic. Though there’s over an acre of plants, the weeds are minimal and it makes for a good shopping experience. Dave, the owner, also plants his gardens in plastic sheeting with holes cut for transplants.
For my nursery, I decided to just go their route and put some plastic down in my yard. The stuff lasts 10 years, even in Florida sun.
Yeah, eventually I’ll have to throw it out, but it will get a lot of use before then. Plus it will save me a lot of work. No need for a weed eater or for procuring and then hauling mulch around.
Woven landscape fabric (unlike straight cheap black plastic) allows water to pass through into the soil beneath. This, and the warmth of the plastic, encourages the germination of weed seeds – and their death through light starvation.
However, it wasn’t Martin Crawford, my experience with the nursery, or the knowledge of weedy death that really pulled me into the idea of experimenting with plastic in the garden.
The final plastic straw that pushed me over into testing weed barriers in my garden this fall was seeing three videos from Herrick Kimball (inventor of the Whizbang Chicken Plucker and author of The Planet Whizbang Idea Book For Gardeners which I now believe is a must-buy book for homesteaders).
And we understand if you are still a little skeptical. The whole idea of having an environmentally sound garden then combining it with plastic seems unnatural but even in our small backyard garden, Mom and the rest of us found the use of plastic – for many reasons – worked really well with our plants.
As a result, we also saw fewer gophers who, it seemed, disliked the taste of our black plastic bags! Just goes to show you do not need crazy high tech methods to deliver you from weeds and lock in moisture. Just learn to use plastic for your garden and you will be eating pretty!
Article Source: The Prepper Project
Photo Source: The Prepper Project