Rock Garden Yard 60

Professional Tips for Using Landscape Fabric Right ? North Coast Gardening

When in doubt, use more! I use Dewitt brand woven landscape fabric. You want it to be a woven fabric so that water and air can penetrate. You also want to purchase a professional grade of landscape cloth, since the thickness of the fabric and tightness of the weave can affect how long it lasts.

It still lets water through if you put it fuzzy side up, but not quite as effectively. When you first start unrolling your fabric, place it so you have an extra inch or so to fold up on the side of your edging or pathway. What this does is leave no place where weeds can crop up along the edges, because all the soil is covered thoroughly by fabric.

Try to smooth the fabric so the fuzz wants to stick to the sides of your edging or concrete, so the fabric is adhering to a surface and not flipping backwards on itself. You get this stripe of weeds in the middle of the bed that is very hard to get rid of. You want the fabric to adhere totally to the soil surface and not be loose or flapping. I have also seen landscapes where those flaps are waving in the wind, having worked their way out from under the mulch.

Perennial plants like to spread out a bit, and send new shoots out from their roots. Perennial roots will choke out weeds once they are mature, so do cut out a generous hole for them when you plant, and check them every year when you cut them back to see if you need to cut more fabric away from their base for them to have room to breathe.

I definitely recommend it if you want to cut clean planting holes in weed mat. New weed seeds will still blow in on top of your mulch, and in order to keep your fabric effective, you must pull them out before their roots get big enough to penetrate the weed cloth. Photo credit: Compost photo by normanack on Flickr. Genevieve Schmidt is a landscape designer and owns a fine landscape maintenance company in Arcata, CA. The owner of North Coast Gardening, she is also a contributing writer at Garden Design Magazine and has written for numerous print and online publications.

I really appreciate this post. We recently landscaped our whole yard and I was searching everywhere for information on landscape fabric. I also read your posts about why you hate it and when it may be appropriate and they all presented fantastic points.

All together, you really helped me plan out the direction I took in our yard. I used the high quality woven fabric and it was great to work with and gives me peace of mind. I am very happy with the result and very thankful to you for your insight. Keep up the good work. David, thank you so much for your very kind comments! Feedback like that definitely keeps me going.

Go, you! My husband and I recently finished working on a small area of the front entrance. It was a huge pile of dirt, mud and weeds. The idea is then to just place a few potted plants on top of the rocks. Today was the first day it rained since we finished our project and we noticed that water is gathering under the rocks.

Is this s bad thing? Could it hurt our foundation since is right up against the side of the house? How should we go about fixing the problem if it is one? I would advise contacting a local landscape contractor for a consultation. I have a square foot area of very poor soil and roots along a lakeside shore.

My plan was to lay down some landscape fabric and then cover it with six to eight inches of good topsoil and turn it into a lawn. Any comments would be appreciated. Larry � Landscape Fabric Lining Technology do that! Just leave out the landscape fabric, as there is no need for it and it will do a lot of harm and never break down.

The roots will go right through it in time and it will be a profound mess. Other than that your plan sounds great! Topdress with a half inch of compost yearly for best results into the future.

How does this sound: I have a 45 degree grade about feet wide and foot deep that slopes downward from my front lawn to the hard surface county road.

It is in grass which is dormant for the next couple of winter months. I want to avoid mowing the slope from here on out, so I am purchasing enough Dewitt fabric and pins to cloak the slope in multiple layers. After a few weeks I plan to cut holes and plant blue rug junipers in diamond patterns along the entire slope. Anything wrong with this picture? Please take the time to schedule a consultation with a local landscape contractor who can advise on the particulars of your situation.

Thanks so much for the advice on how to install the landscape fabric and recommending a sturdy brand. We have about ft. So we hope the fabric will cut down on that chore. My wife and I would like to reclaim our planting beds which are overrun with several varieties of agressive groundcover that propogate by underground tubers.

We have spent countless hours trying to dig up and otherwise erradicate the stuff only to come up short year after year. Will landscape fabric be able to supress an agressive groundcover? Thanks in advance for the advice. My gut is saying that no, landscape fabric will not solve your problem, it will only make it harder to solve in the long run. I think if you have not been tackling this issue thoroughly removing every new sprout that emerges and digging any bulbs that may have become dislodged every two weeks for two years then you have not yet exhausted what you can do manually.

Once you have taken that course of action then yes, often landscape fabric can keep on top of it in future, but if the plants are still robust, then no, the plants will grow through the fabric. I have not had much success with herbicides for plants with tuberous roots like this. Good luck! Thank you so much for such a clear article.

I look forward to reading more after I finish the project I interupted! My husband and I are slowly working on the landscape around our house. We would like to create a path between an area of ground cover and the side of our house. Would this be an area to use landscape fabric? We will be covering it with an inorganic material, but think it best to create a barrier between the soil and the rock.

Are we faulty in our thinking? Any advice would be much appreciated. Would you still recommend a professional grade landscape fabric? I understand the purpose of the pins to hold down the cloth but I am not so sure that using pins every foot is the right thing to do, such as on my project when I am using gravel instead of lightweight materials mulch or straw. Are pins even needed for gravel patios or paths when you overlap by one foot or when your fabric is wide enough to cover the area with one pass and edging is used?

Consequently creating exit point for them to thrive. I really liked your idea of doubling the layers of the Dewitt pro 5mill fabric it looks indestructible for under gravel paths or patios, but do you put both of the fuzzy sides facing down? The edging than acts as the pins to hold down the landscaping fabric also it will create a better barrier against the weeds since the ends of the fabric seems to be the weakest link? What is the realistic lifespan of a gravel patio and path when you use 2 layers of Dewitt pro 5 mil before the weeds win.

Getting the material and finding someone to do it is the easy part, finding someone to do it right the first time is the hard part. I though I had every variable considered and resolved, until I woke up this morning to find a pond where my gravel fire pit patio used to be insufficient drainage never crossed my mind. I bought some goldfish for it and my young daughter thought that it was even better than before� back to the drawing board, back to digging.

Dear Agnostos, The depth and specificity of your questions make them outside the scope of what I can answer for you. I have ft and is always a big chore to keep weeds controled. And put straw mulch around each plant?

Sounds like a plan Scott! I am getting ready to start planting in my neighborhood garden. Last year was my first time planting and I was extremely successful in growing a variety of vegetables. However, the weeds were choking the life out of my garden. The soil quality is not the best, so I wanted in invest in some landscape fabric. I am going to look into the Dewitt brand, but I wanted to know if it would affect my plants.

What do you suggest? I made a garden for veggies this year and laid down landscaping fabric and added planting soil to a 10ftx10ft space. I am now realizing you are supposed to cut holes?! Will the roots grow through the fabric or do i need to try and make slits through the dirt?

Weed is growing and no matter what I do to get rid of it, spray, till and remove weed, it keeps coming back. I was thinking of putting Landscape fabric to cover the whole area and wanted to know if it a good idea to plant some ground cover scattered across to help hold the soil from eroding. Would plants be better? Any thought would be greatly appreciated. Hi Genevieve: I have an area approximately 14 feet square with a slight slope about 2 feet over the 14 feet.

It was an old rock garden that someone filled over and planted grass, which has never taken properly.

Make points:

Though this accumulation of landscaping is larger than an dull area of grasssurprising as well as privately matched to the country or grassed area area, landscape fabric lining system. deep. Pierce them about a grassed area about when the week to be sure a deer do landscape fabric lining system turn used to them as well as only travel around.

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