hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and i want to start this video by showing you some
footage from around my farm something that i deal with here the previous owners of this property
were quite fond of using a variety of different kinds of weed control fabric or weed barrier or
plastic cloth to try to suppress weeds around the landscape it looks like they tried to cover
it up initially with some mulch some of that mulch is eventually worn away you see that the
uv has taken its toll on this material and it starts to go into tatters in the garden
i first ran into this early on when i was trying to just plant some perennials in the garden
and of course i get a couple inches down i hit this barrier i have to cut through it i
find that the soil underneath is in just really poor condition and so it's easy to conclude from
seeing it in the past context that weed control fabric doesn't do what it's supposed to do for
very long in the garden and it's a royal pain for future owners of your property just sits there
as a lasting artifact of of what you did in your garden and it starts to get in worse condition and
look really really ugly so that being said there are times when ground cover fabric can be useful
i use it in production situations for my nursery and as a nursery barrier on the top of gravel or
on the top of soil it does serve a great purpose of trying to keep weeds and soil-borne pathogens
away from the crops that are above it but in the landscape covered with mulch it's a very
very short-term solution now you can see in the video that there's a they used a wide variety
of different landscape cloths the one you're more likely to run into these days is this fairly thin
stuff you can get this at the hardware store it's very light very thin semi-permeable looks like the
water can go straight down through it and the water will go down through it but the organic
matter won't and so i'm going to show you some footage here where i dug away at in my regular
garden with just mulch in it you can see that what happens is that that organic mulch at the top
begins to break down and it starts to improve the condition of the soil directly beneath it
and that's what that's the natural soil profile thing where you get the organic matter at the top
darker soil high up and then it goes back down towards parent material down below
if you look at this next piece of footage here you can see where i've removed this long-term plastic
that was sitting and creating a barrier so the stuff above it is nice as a nice and organic it
traps the organic matter up above but down below the soil is poor it's very light colored and you
can even see that the uh that the bindweed has been using the underneath underside of
this plastic as kind of a place to throw its roots and uh and extend beneath the plastic
so it really didn't serve the purpose and it does deteriorate the condition of the soil over the
long term now where is the appropriate place to use landscape fabric like this well i guess what i
will say is you get the benefit of it early on so if you have something like a perennial weed that's
hard to control something like couch grass or that buying wheat i was just mentioning you can get
short-term control over those weed problems by raking away the area covering it with a landscape
cloth like this and then mulching over top of it with uh with with wood chips for a short period of
time that will control your weed problem over the long term this stuff starts to break down
the more persistent weeds will find their way through it and like i mentioned before
the organic matter that accumulates above it starts to break down and that organic matter that
starts to break down becomes a place where all of the new weed seeds that drop up above all the
spreading weed seeds actually just move in anyway so you've basically lost your control of the weeds
in that circumstance now let me show you a quick comparison between this cloth and the ground
cloth that i use for my nursery and how they're used quick comparison here before i finish up
is this is the stuff i found at the hardware store i hope you can get a good shot of that
it's basically almost see-through it's very light very it feels very tear resistant but it's
very light and isn't going to last very long it's going to break down on the landscape fairly easily
the other one that i want to show you is this and this is the one that i've used as the ground cloth
in this greenhouse here and you can see on this one i mean that's a very heavy material in
comparison it lasts a lot longer on something like this when i put it down i can usually get that
to last about five years in a greenhouse maybe a little bit more with some wear and tear on it so
it will last a little bit longer so you can see how i've used it in the greenhouse here
is that it acts as a barrier there's gravel underneath this but it acts as a barrier
to stop insects like ants that sometimes come up at the bottom of my greenhouse
it will stop weeds from germinating on top of it at least temporarily
so it makes it a little bit easier to control the soil soil-borne pathogens and the weeds
that could come into this greenhouse so in this circumstance uh very appropriate
between the two landscape fabrics uh like this the the thinner one and the thicker one uh probably
out in the landscape well i guess it depends on how long you want to last if you wanted to
last a long time maybe say underneath some rocks and you want it to be a permanent installation
you might err on the side of the heavier landscape cloth i think in general it's probably a good
idea to stick away from the pure plastic ones that's what i see as old ones in my landscape
that were just this impermeable plastic and i think it just does a number on the soil
the water can't pass up and down and so it's it's a real mess plus it gets it's gets very brittle
over a length of time that's all i have for you today on landscape fabric or weed control fabric
i think i'll entitle this video something along the lines of long-term pain for short-term gain
because that's my viewpoint on it i just don't see it as a as a long-term good solution in the garden
of course if you have a different viewpoint on that if you've had some success using it
i'd love to hear from you drop your comments down below the video and thanks again for watching