Landscape Cloth: A Rant
/On a previous episode of the Garden Show with Sally Spillane, Victoria went on a passionate rant about landscape cloth.
She hates it.
So does Sally.
We thought, in case you didn't get a chance to listen, this info was important enough to share again.
Read on or watch the video to find out why landscape cloth is so bad!
It seems like it would be good in theory—a piece of permeable cloth that would block weeds, and even Sally said when she first started gardening, she thought, "Oh yeah, that sounds easy." But in reality, that's not how it actually works.
Here's what years of experience with the stuff has revealed:
The mulch lays in an odd and unattractive way and the wood chips or mulch do not disintegrate or compost from the ground up.
The cloth is not as "permeable" as it should be and it doesn’t allow water to flow naturally. The water pools and runs in strange patterns instead of evenly seeping through the soil.
The plastic heats up the temperature of the soil and kills the microorganisms.
Healthy soil is moist, soft, crumbly, and full of worms and bugs. When we arrive on a property where someone has previously used it, we will remove the cloth and the soil under it is dead—it doesn’t have any worm activity or good bacteria.
The only situation I would use landscape cloth is with a non-compostable mulch like river stones, pea gravel, or pavers for a walkway or an area under a deck—somewhere where you want NOTHING to grow.
Whatever you do, DO NOT use it in your garden where you want to grow plants. And definitely don’t cut a hole and plant a young tree or shrub surrounded by a sea of landscape cloth.
Your plants will not thrive in those conditions.
Victoria and the landscaping crew have unearthed plants surrounded by landscaping cloth where the plant grew bigger than that tiny initial hole someone cut for it and the cloth was literally choking the base of the plant.* In one instance, roots had grown across the surface of the cloth under the mulch—no where near any soil—because the plant was so restricted by the plastic cloth. That plant is stunted. It will never grow to it’s full size, it will always be vulnerable to bugs and illness, because it doesn’t have the room or the nutrients to thrive.
A much better solution for weeds is to use either cardboard or newspaper under your mulch. This will effectively smother the weeds. It will compost, so you may have to lay it down again once every two or three years, but your garden will be healthy and vibrant and your plants will thank you.
*We also want to mention burlap and tree cages here. Similarly, they will choke a plant if left on during the planting process. You ALWAYS remove burlap and any type of plastic container, plastic ring or metal cage when panting!