Should I Use Landscape Fabric?
Earlier this season or last year, you renovated your landscaping and gardening beds and installed a lining of landscaping fabric to maintain the quality of your plants and flowers, prevent weed growth and reduce routine gardening tasks. This seemed like a good idea until you later noticed a new crop of weeds sprouting throughout your landscaping. Now you may be wondering — does landscape fabric actually work and prevent weed growth?
The Pros and Cons of Landscape Fabric
Landscape fabric is typically made from linen, polyester or recycled plastic materials and is marketed as an effective solution for reducing or preventing harmful and unsightly weed growth.
But what many homeowners find is that after digging up their gardens and placing landscape fabric, there’s still a fair amount of weed growth invading their plants and flowers. So if it’s not achieving its basic purpose, should you use landscape fabric? While landscape fabric can offer a few benefits to your landscaping, most landscaping and gardening professionals recommend that homeowners avoid using landscape fabric.
Reasons to Avoid Using Landscape Fabric
If you’re debating whether to install landscape fabric throughout your landscape beds, consider these important landscape fabric cons:
- Won’t Prevent Weeds: While landscape fabric can prevent some weeds from popping up in your gardening beds, this product won’t actually keep weed growth at bay because weed seeds don’t travel through the soil. They migrate using breezes or animals. As these seeds travel, they are deposited on the ground’s surface, bypassing the strategically placed landscape fabric placed under the mulch layer.
- Compact Soil: For soil to be healthy and receive necessary nutrients, it needs to be crumbly and loose and allow plants and grasses to easily spread their roots and grow without encountering resistance. The soil underneath landscape fabric ends up becoming compacted and hard, preventing any roots from stretching and making planting and digging difficult.
- Prevents Re-Seeding: Using landscape fabric makes it incredibly difficult for plants to re-seed.
- Reduces Soil Nutrients: When the soil is compacted, it doesn’t receive nutrients from grass clippings and shredded leaves and won’t allow plant and grass roots to receive all of the air and water they need to achieve full, thriving growth.
- Restricts Movement of Helpful Organisms: Landscape barriers also prevent helpful animals, insects and fungi from moving throughout the different soil layers and mixing helpful organic materials from different parts of the soil.
A Couple Landscape Fabric Pros
While landscape fabric is mostly considered a poor solution for preventing weeds and will eventually ruin the health and quality of your soil and plants, it can offer a few benefits to your gardening setup.
Landscaping fabric is a convenient solution if you’re a gardener who prefers planting annual flowers. With landscape fabric, you can easily and quickly lift the fabric and remove all of the previous year’s plants in one motion, instead of pulling up each plant or bulb individually. Landscape fabric is also an ideal solution beneath rock and gravel installations for fast, clean removal in the future.
Keep Your Landscaping Lush and Healthy With Help From Bee Green Pest Control
Bee Green Pest Control has been Central Florida’s solution for comfortable and thriving landscaping for several years. We’re a family-owned and operated local Florida company with a continued dedication to offering all of our Central Florida customers the most personalized, comprehensive fertilization and systemic pest control services available. Learn more about our unique lawn care services today by filling out our online contact form or by calling 813-661-9300 to speak to a team member.