When you garden, fast growth is very important. The weeds in your garden keep plants tiny and in constant need of nourishment. Keep the protein in your plants and read the following:

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).

 For a nice backyard garden the above is fine but I wouldn’t use it for a huge field. It just is not cost effective or worth the time and effort. Just think of your personal garden’s melons and squash, and how difficult they are to weed, and you get the idea where we are going with this!

If you go on over to The Prepper Project you can read much more on this subject and see some great videos regarding four day carrots!

To sum up, gardens are great and so are pastics when used the right way!