"Jean" wrote in message
news:FRAPf.30027$2c4.9541@dukeread11...
persephone wrote:

Comes my gardener and says that this doesn't work. Weeds come
up anyway, and are harder to pull out because stuck in the cloth.

Your gardener is right. A few years down the road, you'll have a worse
time removing grass or weeds. They become hopelessly entangled, and
you'll need a really sharp knife, or a lot of muscle to remove the mess.

Last summer my daughter moved into a home where the grass was starting
to grow into the flower bed. You couldn't tell the previous owners had
used the fabric in the bed. I pulled out my trusty shovel from the back
of the truck, and tried to edge it. A few days later, with the help of
my grown son, we were able to edge the small flower bed, after removing
most of the rose bushes and plants from the tangled mess.

Good Luck!

If that is so would a biodegradable weed mat prove sufficient? Grass,
cardboard or even old carpet should do the trick to surpress weeds but
slowly rot and avoid the root problem. My wife used layers of newspaper and
some old carpet to surpess oxalis and it has worked very nicely. A week or 2
when I dug some mulch into that garden I pulled up the odd mix of root and
old carpet however the carpet had significantly degraded. Had I left it in a
year or 2 more it would be gone.

rob