The weather finally let up a bit for us to plant our garden! My husband built four beautiful new beds for me, and I have another one under construction. Last year was our first summer in this house and we just planted straight into the ground. It is a great way to garden, but for us it just got too crowded and unorganized.
Since we want to access the garden beds from all sides we needed to make sure that the pathways didn’t become overgrown with weeds….I have a hard enough time weeding the garden! I ran across this great way to stop weeds from taking over without expensive landscaping cloth or chemicals. I know I read about it in a magazine, but for the life of me can’t remember which one. Sorry!
First my husband used the weed-eater and basically took the grass/weeds down to the dirt level.
Next, and this is where all of those newspapers come handy if you are an avid couponer, lay out a fairly thick layer of newspaper. We made sure that all edges were overlapping quite a bit.
Next completely wet down the papers. (Note, it’s best to do this on a day where the wind isn’t blowing…we almost had to chase down a number of pages!)
Then spread out your bark/mulch layer.
There you have it! I am not sure if this will last as long as landscaping cloth, but it utilized items that we already had and didn’t call for any chemicals! Win-win in my book.
Your raised beds look beautiful! That’s a great idea… I might use that idea in between my garden rows this year, I’ve been thinking of how I could cut down on the weeds. Bonus is that the newspaper will break down and worked into the soil next year!