Quick Tip: Do Less
Landscape fabric promises a weed-free garden, but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Over time, it breaks down, tangles with roots, and creates an even bigger mess than before. In our newest blog, we break down why this so-called “weed barrier” is one of the most persistent garden myths, and what to do instead!
Quick Tip: Do Less. The answer to a better garden is one less step for you.
If you’ve been on social media gardening channels at all, you can see home improvement projects run amok by folks encouraging others to use landscape fabric to “stop the weeds”.
For the love of all things good, we must spread the word. Landscape fabric is a burden, not a help. A burden that you pay good money, time, and effort to put down. As a gardener who has had the privilege to work in gardens all over, I have come across landscape fabric in all its forms over the years and, in my decades of gardening, never once seen it work as advertised.
What is landscape cloth?
Landscape cloth, landscape fabric, or weed barrier is a ground-covering fabric typically made from synthetic materials that blocks light penetration into the soil and supposedly prevents weed seeds from germinating. It usually comes in two forms, either woven or nonwoven—depending on how much air and moisture passage a project aims to allow into the soil. Woven synthetics are usually used for weed barriers, while nonwoven sheets are typically laid down as a barrier between soil and gravel to prevent hardscaping materials from sinking over time. Now, as with everything in life, there are always caveats to any argument. Landscape cloth is useful as a barrier between subsoil and gravel, especially when installing hardscaping or digging drainage. It is a burden and wasteful when used in the garden. Why? First, landscape cloth isn’t free, so it’s an additional, unnecessary expense. Secondly, the woven cloth is made from polypropylene or polyester fabric. This thinly woven plastic breaks down when it is exposed to heat and moisture outdoors for years, eventually shredding and adding microplastics to the landscape. The most important reason why it’s a burden?
Landscape cloth DOESN’T WORK. Within a short window, soil and organic matter will accumulate on top of the weed barrier, creating a new medium for weed seeds to drift in and germinate. Breaking down wood mulch or the stone dust of an unwashed granite mulch creates a perfect growing surface for opportunistic weeds. The porous nature of the woven cloth means that even if you don’t have soil on top of the barrier, the weed seeds still germinate, and then the tiny roots can grow through the cloth anyway. Then, when you have to weed, you now have to pull up the weeds and disentangle them from the landscape cloth. On top of all this hassle, landscape cloth also limits the growing space for chosen plants, forcing them to funnel their growth through the narrow hole cut into the fabric for access to light and air.
The answer is to do less. Skip the landscape cloth. The weed barrier doesn’t eliminate the need to weed the garden, but it does make it more difficult.
What to do
Frequently, when you begin planting in a new project at an established housing development, you’ll come across a weed barrier in various states of decay. There’s nothing one can do but just get stuck in and dig it out. If you plant on top of the weed barrier and soil that’s on top of it, you’ll have a future headache of weeding the new planting design that is now intertwined with the plastic. Heaven forbid if the homeowner ever gets the urge to move plants around, lift and divide perennials, or plant bulbs. I once was charged with planting hundreds of bulbs, only to discover that the compacted earth beneath several very mature evergreens had multiple layers of weed barrier under the mulch. A job that was supposed to take a couple of hours ended up taking the entire day.
But wait, there’s more.
Finally, the worst comes if a plastic weed barrier doesn’t actually break down. In a past project, a landscape plastic barrier was installed to prevent creeping warm-season grasses from entering the new beds. However, the warm-season grasses crept in anyway, and the landscape cloth hadn’t broken down in the years since it was installed. It created an impenetrable layer 6 inches below the soil surface for the perennial planting, blocking the plants’ ability to put down deep roots and access the lower water table. The planting beds essentially became oversized in-ground containers. During heat waves, plants selected for drought tolerance failed due to the shallow growing media. The maintenance team attempted to increase water permeability by drilling through the landscape cloth, but to no avail. Eventually, the homeowner had to install a drip irrigation system to support the extensive planting during droughts. The headache and expense of the plastic landscape weed barrier compound year after year, as it resists breakdown and requires ever more resources to keep the garden beds functional. Eventually, the homeowner will need to pay to dig up hundreds of plants and yards of planting soil to remove the landscape weed barrier, then replant everything. All of this could have been avoided by simply omitting the landscape fabric in the first place.
To this end, please consider this a plea to do less. Your future you will thank you.
