Landscape fabrics will not "leach" any inwanted substances from what the fabric is made of in to your soil, just be careful and do not get the newer ones with a built in plant killer. If you can get enough newspaper would be a much less expensive media to do what you want.

g'day erin,

you can do it without fabric as has already been said use newspaper and lots of it.

check our site for pics and ideas.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

Dont mean to steal this thread. I have a similar question along the same line.

Iam done dealing with weeds in my veggie garden. Last year it completely inundated my 10x10 veggie garden. With new babies in the house, I dont have the time to handpick weeds. My plan is to cultivate, add compost etc and then cover the surface with landscape fabric. Then plant the seeds at selected spots cutting the fabric.

Could experts here let me know if I am out of my mind taking this approach?

Thanks

You aren't out of your mind, but you may not get the results you are hoping for.

Let's divide all landscape fabrics into 2 types. There is the thin, woven stuff and there is the thicker, more plastic like stuff.

There are different grades (thicknesses) of each.

If you use the heavy stuff then water won't penetrate except at the plant holes. The good news is weeds won't grow through it, but watering/fertilizing is a real chore unless you put each plant in a depression so the water runs to the depression. Problem with that is during a heavy rain things can get over watered.

If you use the woven stuff you will probably find enough sunlight gets through it that weeds still grow. They run under the fabric and find the holes you cut for your plants and poke out. I tried this one year and just walking on the stuff tore it and where it tore weeds came through. Removing weeds is impossible without removing the fabric.

If you really want to beat the weeds for good, stop using the ground that naturally grows them. Use containers where practical (an example would be a container of herbs near the kitchen door for ease of harvest and use) and raised beds for larger plantings. It's not that you won't get any weeds rather you will get so few they aren't much bother to deal with.

If you want to go the landscape fabric route be sure to cover it with a mulch weeds won't like growing in to prevent sunlight from passing through it and sprouting the weed seeds.

I have found that landscape fabric eventually gets weeds and it acts as a barrier for macro fauna like worms and pill bugs that help till the soil naturally. I have also found that the two types of weed barrier slow down water and gas exchange in the soil and creates an almost sour and anerobic smell at the soil level underneath it. I don't use it except in places I don't want anything to grow like around my airconditioner with gravel on top. I personally do not think it is a good way to go. Regular mulching and a little weeding is much better for the garden in the long run.

Any garden can get weeds at any time. Simply covering the soil with a landscape fabric and some mulch, or even newspaper and some mulch, may not totally solve the problem, because "weed" seeds float around on the wind and settle in, germinate, and grow where conditions are conducive to do that. I do use newspaper (keeps any "weed" seeds in the soil from germinating) covered with a good, thick mulch (helps prevent the "weed" seeds floating in the air from finding someplace to germinate). Since the newspapers are recycled they are essentially free while you need to buy some landscape fabric, an unnecessary expenditure, and unless that fabric is a really good, thick, tightly woven fabric is will not do the job it is supposed to. Landscape fabric will not add anything of value to your soil while newspaper will.

Thanks for the response. My soil is nicely prepped. The fabric is a woven material. Vegetable garden is on the backyard where esthetics is least of my worries.

Cant I just cover the prepped surface with the fabric and then plant the seeds on top and skip the mulch part? I know I wont beat the weeds completely, but I was certain I could stand decent chance of fighting them this way. I did not want to cover the fabric with mulch layer for 2 reasons.

1. At the end of the season, I want to remove the fabric and allow the bed to breath.
2. Mulch degrades over time and weeds can use that as a medium to grow.

Am I wrong?

For the past 10 years, I have been using black, woven polypropylene weed barrier that I get from the Soil Conservancy district, it comes in rolls of 300' by 4 or 6' wide. This allows air and moisture in, although I use gravity irrigation that generally goes under it.

I would suggest not cutting holes in it - although that works, it shreds easily and within a few years, there are annoying strands of plastic everywhere. I've found it far easier to just lay out a 4' wide section, leave an inch, and lay out another, planting between the two. Most of the beds have vertical cattle panels, so I can grow stuff upright.

In the fall, I roll it up and store it somewhere else, and add what ever needs adding to the strips of soil where I'll plant next year. If I leave it out, it deteriorates from the winter sun, and with the winds we get around here, tries 'a Dorothy' and fly to Kansas.

There are some weeds that come up through the gap, but they are a lot easier to control, and that part can be mulched. There will be some stuff like purslane that will grow on top the weed barrier, but thats pretty easy to control. I really like the system, it makes it easy to walk up and down w/o getting muddy, I can move a cart along between the rows, and the vertical panels allow good plant concentration.

Check around for prices. The Soil Conservancy sells this stuff for far less than any commercial outfit.

Using it seasonally is better if you have to use it, but using it all year round is IMHO and experience a bad idea.

The inexpensive "weed barrier" fabric you buy from the neighborhood hardware or big box all in one general store is so thin that you can see through it, and that will do little to stop "weed" growth unless heavily covered with some mulch material, aside from the aesthetics.
If you buy the slightly more expensive landscape fabric that is tighly woven and very difficult to see through you can use less mulch material to hide it, again aesthetics, because the tight weave will do much better controlling "weed" growth.

the one I bought was quite expensive. 20$ for 3x100 I think. Anyway just had a second thought.

Ive decided to abandon my poorly designed 8x8 bed and build two 4x4 square foot garden. The more I read about it, the more I am enamored with the idea. Fact that it offers the best weed control option, excites me. My recipe for the soil is from Glen Sq Foot Gardenening tip

3 cubic ft. bale of peat moss to 3 medium sized bags of vermiculite
1 large bag of composted (very dry) manure.
1 bag of ''Miracle Grow'' potting soil, 1 pound of bone meal and 1/2 pound blood meal.

Will post as I build it.

Thanks

So, after you cover your soil with polypropylene, and its embedded colorant and UV stabilizers, do you still intend to call your garden 'organic'?

Yes. Putting down cardboard or newspaper or magazines might contaminate the soil with leaching trace amounts of formaldehyde. bleach, and other products used to make the paper, and for what I know, the soy-based ink came from GM soybeans.

The use of plastic gauze row covers, with their UV stabilizers, held up by PVC hoops, prevents early summer flea beetles and other insect pests. Some people even use plastic covered bread bag ties to hold up plants on painted t-posts, and carry their produce to market in (gulp) plastic boxes.

My newspaper mulch is precisely why I don't call myself an organic gardener. If I used a petroleum based mulch instead of an organic mulch, I guess I wouldn't feel like I was using organic methods.

While bleach is used to make the pulp white, so the paper will be white, there is none in the pulp when it is put on the paper machine to make the paper, the bleach is all washed out. In my 39 years of paper making I have not known of the use of formaldehyde in the paper making process, it was used in one process as a releasing agent, but there was none used in making paper. Since most all of the soybeans grown have been Genetically Engineered to be resistant to the glyphosate products that is in the soya based inks, as well as most of the foods you eat today, because most of the corn in food products also has been so engineered.
There will not be much of any foreign material that an organic grower need concern themself about in newspaper or cardboard. If you were to use paper from books and magazines that would be different because of the process of making those items.

39 years of making paper! What an interesting person you are Kimmsr. I hope you're right about the newspaper because I've used a lot of it, under sawdust, for garden paths.

We made fine paper where I worked, the paper that magazines such as Architectural Digest was printed on. Newsprint is made from ground pulp, not the digested pulp we made and is treated much less with anything that might cause harm to your soil and cardboard is treated even less.
Many paper manufacturers that do bleach their pulp today are switching over from the chlorine based process to one using Hydrogen Peroxide instead, but for the most part that bleaching process is a 4 step process that involves washing the chlorine and caustic soda out of the pulp because they hinder the binding of the fibers when paper is made.

Natural or synthetic?

Look at a commercial grade fabric. Try Sunbelt by Dewitt. It's a 3.2oz woven poly fabric that lets tons of water and air through. Around $70 for 3' x 300'. Burn holes in it using a torch, then lay it out and plant your plants through the holes. When the growing season is over, roll it up and save it for next year.

I've used landscape fabric, but several experiences have made me believe that the stuff just doesn't belong in a garden. My general rule now is that if it doesn't eventually break down and add organic matter to the soil, don't use it. Just using a mulch like ground leaves is enough to keep most weeds out and makes it very easy to pull out any that happen to sprout - then at the end of the growing season it can just be turned under. I hve found that plants grow just fine on top of landscape fabric - in the mulch - and roots will grow right into and through the fabric. Some aggressive weed plants under the fabric will have often spread out roots until it finds a place to shoot up, sometimes right next to the things you want to grow. When it does this, the weed roots are far superior to anything you want to grow - bad competition. And while you can use liquid fertilizers that will pass through the fabric, you cannot amend the soil at all. Organic material mixed with the soil is the goal, and fabric between the two keeps that from happening. I've had cases where I've had a nice mulch on top of fabric, and then soil as hard as concrete underneath - for some reason I just don't find that happening when I put organic material directly in contact with the soil. Finally, I have found myself working to revive garden beds in houses I've bought or lived in, with severe weed problems. Occasionally I have found old landscape fabric buried under four to ten inches of mulch, weed-filled soil. It makes it so I can't dig deeply to loosen and improve the soil without a tug of war to pull and dig it all out from under and around all the existing plantings, most of which has roots spread out and trying to get through the fabric. It is the exact same reason I would suggest never using a rock mulch or one of those rubber mulches in areas where you are growing plants - no matter what you do, organic matter will start collecting on top of that mulch, and once it is buried it is a nightmare to doing all the things you really want to be doing to improve soil and grow plants. I don't mind newspaper for hard-core locations, and I don't mind things like wood chips or bark. Any organic materials work great. You may say they aren't as effective in stopping all weeds, but in many ways they don't have to be. When weeds come up, the mulch keeps the soil underneath soft and workable, and those weeds pull out very easily. Very quickly, most of the weeds are eliminated and my gardens stay very nice and weed free without any backbreaking work.

I had used it under the mulch in the pathways of my garden at a previous house (the grey woven kind). When I went to add beds, I removed some of the cloth and I found a lot of dead worms wound up in the fibers. I took the rest of it out and I don't use it anymore. The current garden lies atop the damaged boxes from the move (I gave away the useable ones) and the bazillion IKEA boxes from the kitchen remodel.

annpat, all newpaper is soy based & organic, isn't?

I use cardboard.

I'd like to jump in here and try to refocus this discussion on the original and very old questio which didn't seem to get answered. It is safe to use fabric as a liner for a vegetable bed? In other words, line the bed with it -- and then fill it up with soil. Are there any organic, non-toxic liners available for a raised vegetable bed? If so, can someone please provide a link?

jolj, newspaper is made of cellulose. The inks used to print on that paper would be soy based.

These landscape fabrics, aka "weed" barriers, are made of polypropylene, plastic. These fabrics do not leach any toxic substances, so it would be "safe" to use them although largely unnecessary. If the raised bed is more than 4 inches deep that soil in that raised bed will, effectively, block access to sunlight any plants growing from the underlying soil so the landscape fabric will not do much.

A garden here built several raised beds, 4 feet high for senior citizens to work, and lined some with black plastic and left some unlined. 8 years later those beds had to be moved because the property was sold and the new owner had other uses for it. when dismantling these beds they found the wood in every bed had been invaded by the wee critters that digest wood, whether lined or not. The damage was the same in each bed.

In over 50 years of looking at liners I have not seen any that as an organic grower I would use and none that I would call organic. Non toxic, well yes. Something I would use? No.

kimmq is kimmsr

Stephen, right Burlap is plant fiber, there for is organic, but it will rot in a year.

So like most plant fiber is must be replaced every year.

jolj and Stephen, there is natural burlap (made of jute fiber) and there are now synthetic burlaps made of polypropylene and other plastic fiber.

How effective burlap might be as a "weed" barrier depends on how tight the weave is. Some I have had were so open that they would not do much to stop unwanted plant growth.

kimmq is kimmsr

Sometime it is like banging your head against a brick wall.

I double up on the layers of burlap, to get better coverage.

It is best to cover the burlap with leave or straw.

No one in their right mind is going to think that plastic fiber which may be called burlap is organic. Gave us the same credit you would want us to give you.

Burlap is made from jute, not plastic, I get did a research on cordage made from natural fiber for another thread on another site. Everyone should use gardenweb as a resource, but do their on research also. Mainly because no matter what some may think or how they act, no one know it all & all of can be fooled.

Synthetic burlap is a name to get you to buy something that is not burlap.

All burlap will rot with in a year or so, that is why some of it is in some applications.

Anything else is not burlap. I can call my cat a dog, but it is still a cat & you should know the differences.

Re: " It is safe to use fabric as a liner for a vegetable bed? In other words, line the bed with it -- and then fill it up with soil. "

I'm not clear on why this would be done. My interpretation of the original question was that the weed barrier was to be used on the sides of the bed, to keep the soil from sifting out through the gaps in the wood. I could see cutting weed barrier and stapling it to the sides of a wooden bed, with a few inches continuing onto the soil so that the soil doesn't sift out where the bed touches the ground, either. It's not how I would build a bed, but it seems reasonable.

But if it covered the bottom of a bed, weed barrier would keep the plant roots from reaching down, and it wouldn't reduce weeds to any significant degree, because weed seeds would migrate to the soil above the weed barrier anyway. It might fight off tree roots for a year or two, but I suspect not for much longer.

I say ll this as someone who uses weed barrier on top of the soil and plants annual vegetables through it, so I'm not opposed to weed barrier. (I lift it and amend between crops. The holes are at standard spacings that I use for a variety of crops. I'm not saying that it wouldn't be better to just weed, but I've come to accept that I don't weed.)

I am hoping to stir up this thread to see if anyone has come up with any new ideas! I want to use landscape cloth to line raised beds. I have gone very far to try to keep away from plastics, but with the arrangement I have, I need something to line the beds. I'd use burlap but they are huge and I don't want to dig them up yearly to replace the burlap. I also need something that will allow water to flow freely so newspaper is off the list. Any suggestions??

Thanks!

dogcatlady,

Always best to start your own thread. You could refer readers back to this one, or another thread, by inserting it link.

Why are you so desperate to line the beds? That info is critical to any sort of useful response.

You don't need to line a raised bed with anything unless you have burrowing pests like rabbits or gophers. In which case you line the bed with wire mesh.

I'm actually making sub-irrigated planters. I'm using giant stock tanks (https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/oval-galvinized-stock-tank-3-ft-w-x-8-ft-l-x-2-ft-h-300-gal-capacity?cm_vc=-10005) and I need something to separate the water chamber from the soil. Every DIY I've seen for SIP's uses lots of plastic (example: http://www.instructables.com/id/Raised-Bed-Wicking-Garden/). I have it all figured out except for the water/soil interface....

On one hand, I'm just trying to avoid plastic because who really knows how bad it is. But on the other hand, I have used hoses, soaker hoses, rain barrels, etc. So if I can't figure out anything else, I guess I'll just use the landscape cloth and be done with it.....

I am going to start another thread....

http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/4595165/m=23/organic-or-safe-weed-cloth

Definitely gonna hijack this ...

Yes, ramshackle raised beds will leak dirt at the corners. So you put an L-shaped dirt blocker in the corners and the problem goes away. That's part of a square nursery pot,

The pot is a great idea!

just curious.....anyone looking at all the info on the level of PFOA's (teflon and like) chemicals being put into everything these days???? Seems like this could be the source of the indestructability of these plastics, also many paper products. These chemicals leaching into garden beds accumulate, and do not degrade. Is the reliance on the convenience of plastic and it's marketing as benign causing us to spread these compounds in to our backyards???