well, carpet is easy to clean up then, and just as good as plastic.
Put it down upside-down and will both look less ragged and
(surprisingly) less easy for weeds to penetrate. I suppose they get
tangled in the hair if they try to push through. In fact, I can not
remember a single weed in the pieces I put down upside down. Should
have done that will all of them.

carpet is a bitch to cut properly, so I ended up using only the small
pieces and throwing away the big ones and I only covered less than one
path out of four. it was a mistake in retrospect but I also had
concerns about putting too much toxic stuff in the garden. but look, I
have one aisle which is wood chips on plastic, and there the weeds
were three feet high this summer even after I hoed in May. I whacked
them in July, but that's no way to have a garden path. from there,
grass sends runners into the beds, which I have to weed, and plantains
and other weeds lean over the beds with their seedheads, so weedy
paths are a major nuisance. do the job right, say I, no organics of
any sort, and a permanent solution. slag is crushed concrete, cheap
gravel substitute. it is as close to organic as possible, because it
will lime the beds while preventing growth.


That's interesting about the carpet, because I tried carpet once and it
turned into a mess because the crab grass grew right through it and then
the carpet was stuck to the ground by the grass! Yikes. But I put it
smooth side down. I'm going to try the fuzzzy side down just to see if
you're right.

but I ain't going with the gravel/slag solultion. Just too messy. I'm
going to try some weed block fabric and see.

Thanks and good gardening

Minus