Garden Mulch Tip: Use Paper to Prevent Weed Growth
There’s nothing like a freshly-mulched garden for upping your curb appeal on-the-cheap. But if you live in an area that’s humid and critter-filled, like we do, it takes about a week for weeds to start poking through the mulch, rapidly overtaking the garden space once again and requiring constant monitoring and pulling.
Now I love gardening. But weeding, not so much. So to keep the number of weeding sessions per blooming season to a minimum, I use a trick I learned from my parents: pre-papering the garden before mulching. After planting any new plants I want to add that season, I haul out my paper recycling box and lay a few sheets’ worth of paper over the dirt everywhere else in the bed. I’m careful not to cover over any spaces that may have bulbs below that haven’t broken the surface yet, but I overlap it everywhere else to ensure that nothing can sneak up between the cracks. Then I plop a generous layer of mulch over the paper.
The result: my plants thrive because they have the benefit of the mulch AND the paper holding the moisture into the soil. (I’m sure the worms appreciate it too, but I haven’t asked them.) The weeds, however, don’t return until the paper biodegrades. Usually, I put down enough layers of paper (3-4 sheets thick) to hold me throughout the spring, summer and fall. And then I re-paper and re-mulch again the following spring.
It takes a while longer to paper as you go, rather than just dumping the mulch and raking it over the garden. But the time I save NOT having to weed (except occasionally around the edges… darned dandelions are so persistent!) makes it more than worth the up-front effort.
And if you use paper you’ve already set aside, it’s free!
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4 Responses to Garden Mulch Tip: Use Paper to Prevent Weed Growth
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April 27th, 2009 10:53 am
Great tip! I have been using this method for years. A couple of things that I think bear mentioning are that the paper builds up your soil and that earthworms love it. I started out a couple of decades ago with lifeless, packed clay soil and now I have rich black earth with a plethora of worms!
April 27th, 2009 5:33 pm
This is a great tip… I’m excited to try it out.
April 27th, 2009 5:51 pm
Celia. thanks for chiming in! I’m glad to hear about the soil quality increase because we have that very same (rocky) packed clay you did. Our house is 24 years old, but the prior owners did nothing with the yard and gardens, so I started at square one last year. Looking forward to more worms!
Katie, let us know how it works for you, too!
July 7th, 2009 8:44 am
Great tip! I’ve often wondered whether I simply have bionic weeds in my yard, because it seemed no matter how much I dug, prepared, used Preen, and mulched, they’d bounce back up again, sometimes with a vengeance! This is much more cost effective than garden fabric. Thanks again!