Reply to What to do with hillside invasive plants?

Forum Index » Lawn and Garden

Reply to "What to do with hillside invasive plants?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Depending on the slope and how big of an erosion problem you might have, you could consider covering the whole slope in landscape fabric and leaving it until next Spring. It should solarize/smother any remaining roots and give them time to die. It obviously wouldn't look great but this is how I converted my lawn to flower beds, and I just covered the landscape fabric with mulch for the first summer/fall and it was adequately presentable.

IMO the key is, you pull up the landscape fabric at the end of the initial period. Long term it will just be a mess and weeds will grow on top of it. But for the initial smothering, it was great. I also used cardboard which was also effective but it broke down pretty quickly and I'm not sure everything was completely killed. After I pulled up the landscape fabric I used a big fork to dig in a bunch of compost before planting. So far (a few years) I haven't had any noticeable issues with grass or old perennial weeds from the lawn coming back. I have weeds obviously, but mostly annuals.

As I mentioned, people also do this with cardboard and tarps and such. But my preferred method would be the landscape fabric. It is kind of wasteful, but I reuse a lot of the fabric each year for vegetables.

One important caveat - The fabric that I used, where it wasn't covered with mulch, rotted from the sun and was a PITA to remove. So make sure you know it's sun-proof if you're not going to cover it. I think that would mean using the thicker, shinier kind and not the dull matte stuff from Home Depot. I think Floret Blog has a bunch of info on landscape fabric and theirs is sunproof. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics