The beds in my small urban garden were set up two years ago by the
builder who did some hard landscaping at a time when I didn't pay much
attention to gardening issues. He put down weedproof fabric over the
soil, then bark chippings on top of that and suggested that when I
wanted to plant anything I cut a hole in the fabric. I've followed
this advice so far with various perennial shrubs. It does eliminate
any weeding and the chippings look neat, but part of me can't help
feeling that it's not the way proper gardeners do things.

Eventually as I stock the garden more and more it will become
impractical to keep this going, and I'll have to take the fabric up.
But in the meantime while things are getting established are there any
real problems with this sort of approach?

Cheers!

Martin

Porous and non-porous membranes prevent weeds growing upwards but one would
not use a non-porous one because of drainage problems.

A porous membrane will not prevent wind blown (or bird dropped!) seeds from
germinating and growing their roots through it. Such weeds are difficult to
remove without damaging the membrane.

I suspect you have no weeds growing downwards because of the chippings or
upwards because of the membrane but that will not last much longer and
incoming seeds will win. However, a spot of "size tens" will put paid to
them!! There is also the possibility that the chipped bark came from a tree
covered with ivy so ivy seeds may be biding their time so keep a close eye
on the bed just in case.

I have an area of garden planted with various shrubs, bluebells and other
perennial spring flowers and with no membrane under the chipped bark there's
few weeds to worry about but ivy seedlings appear now and then - bloody
pigeons sitting on the overhead power cable!

Geoff

On Apr 17, 11:42 pm, Martin Pentreath
wrote:
The beds in my small urban garden were set up two years ago by the
builder who did some hard landscaping at a time when I didn't pay much
attention to gardening issues. He put down weedproof fabric over the
soil, then bark chippings on top of that and suggested that when I
wanted to plant anything I cut a hole in the fabric. I've followed
this advice so far with various perennial shrubs. It does eliminate
any weeding and the chippings look neat, but part of me can't help
feeling that it's not the way proper gardeners do things.

It depends whether or not they are trying to make a low maintenence
garden. We did exactly this for my mother-in-laws garden to make it
more managable about 6 years ago. The only disadvantage that I can see
is that blackbirds scatter the bark looking for insects, the soil
reverts to clay due to lack of new organic waste being incorporated
and the bark on top eventually breaks down into soil and needs topping
up every 3-4 years. Weed seedlings struggle to get a hold. Just wood
shippings on their own work pretty well too but weed fabric is
surprisingly good (and expecially where the soil contains some
perrenial.weed roots like thistle or ground elder).

We plan to do pretty much exactly this for our village hall garden to
make it low maintainence (it was a 6 foot high delerict wilderness of
brambles, ground elder, nettles and thistles until last year). Except
that we will use slate rather than wood chippings on top because the
site is so windy wood chips would just blow away!

Eventually as I stock the garden more and more it will become
impractical to keep this going, and I'll have to take the fabric up.

I would leave it under most of the heavy perrenial shrubs except in
places where you want to plant bulbs.

But in the meantime while things are getting established are there any
real problems with this sort of approach?

Not really. The main one I guess is that the soil doesn't get as much
organic material into it as before, but you can counteract this by
improving the soil locally when you plant anything new. It might
eventually be a problem on a heavy clay soil but even there it will
not bother established shrubs.

Regards,
Martin Brown