All About Gardening
I’ve just come in from STEP 1 of prepping our square foot garden for planting.
This is the garden, minus the two brick planters on the other side of the house that we use for tomatoes. There are six 4′ x 4′ wooden planter boxes. You can see that the neon tape I strung to let the deer see there is fencing here need repair.
Here’s a view from one side.
This shows the weed barrier cloth I put in each planter box, held down by a brick in each corner. You can also see the irrigation system for these three boxes, with the pieces of hose strung together running along a piece of wood and the sprinkler in the center of each box. The six boxes are all irrigated with one timer on an agricultural faucet.
I removed the bricks and stored them in two corners of the garden, pulled the weed barrier cloths off, folded them up and stored them.
The results of the weed barrier cloth vary. This is the worst, but it’s still much better than if I hadn’t shielded the Mel’s Mix. As you can see, weeds love this soil alternative just as much, if not more, than the veggies I want to grow!
All the planter boxes were prepped the same way, and yet each is different on how many weeds were prevented.
I’m going to call this experiment a success because, though there are weeds, there aren’t NEAR as many as there were when I just left them from the fall to the spring uncovered.
My experiment with tarps wasn’t as good as this, either, because the tarps didn’t stand up well with the temperature differences, the wind, the snow and ice, etc. I had put buckets in the center of each box to try to keep water from pooling, but that had varying success. The tarps also tore and the bungee cords I used didn’t hold the tarps on as well as I had hoped.
I think that when we finish in the fall and are getting the boxes ready for the winter again, we’ll put TWO layers of the weed barrier cloth in each box.
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