- 4 days ago
Landscape fabric looks like an easy fix, but this garden lesson shows why it often fails after the first good year. A roll of black weed barrier may stop weeds at the start, yet over time it traps seed, holds mulch on top, blocks soil life, and turns a healthy bed into hard, tired ground. The narration walks through what happens in year one, year three, and year five, then explains why weeds return stronger and harder to pull.
Drawing on a story from Lancaster County and a lesson passed down by a grandmother, the video compares dead soil under fabric with rich earth built by leaves and worms. It also covers where landscape fabric can still make sense, such as under gravel paths or stone walks, and where cardboard, straw, shredded leaves, and wood chips do a better job in the garden. This is practical homestead advice, gardening commentary, and soil health education for anyone trying to mulch beds the right way.
Created for viewers searching for landscape fabric problems, weed barrier alternatives, organic mulch methods, garden bed maintenance, and no-till gardening tips. It also fits listeners who enjoy calm narrated gardening advice, homestead wisdom, and practical backyard soil improvement.
Drawing on a story from Lancaster County and a lesson passed down by a grandmother, the video compares dead soil under fabric with rich earth built by leaves and worms. It also covers where landscape fabric can still make sense, such as under gravel paths or stone walks, and where cardboard, straw, shredded leaves, and wood chips do a better job in the garden. This is practical homestead advice, gardening commentary, and soil health education for anyone trying to mulch beds the right way.
Created for viewers searching for landscape fabric problems, weed barrier alternatives, organic mulch methods, garden bed maintenance, and no-till gardening tips. It also fits listeners who enjoy calm narrated gardening advice, homestead wisdom, and practical backyard soil improvement.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Somebody sold you a roll of black cloth and told you it would end your weeding.
00:04So you spent a Saturday on it.
00:06You pulled everything out of that bed, you raked it level,
00:10you rolled the fabric out and pinned it down with those little staples,
00:14you cut your slits and set your plants in,
00:16and you barrowed wood chips over the whole business until it looked like the front of a bank.
00:21And for a year, it was wonderful.
00:24Almost nothing came up.
00:25You told people about it.
00:27The second year, there were a few weeds and you thought nothing of it.
00:31The third year, there were a good many and they would not pull properly
00:35and when you got hold of one, it brought a piece of the cloth up with it.
00:39By the fifth year, that bed had more weeds in it than it ever had before you started
00:44and the black edges were curling up out of the chips where the dog had scuffed them
00:49and it looked worse than bare dirt.
00:51And when you finally decided to take the whole lot out,
00:54you found out what it had really been doing.
00:57Here is what happened, and it is not that you bought the cheap kind.
01:01That fabric never was a weed barrier.
01:04It was a barrier and the weeds were the one thing it did not stop for long.
01:09What it stopped was everything that makes ground good.
01:13I am Elias Yoder.
01:15I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
01:17I have never in my life laid a sheet of anything across a piece of ground I meant to grow
01:22in
01:23and neither did my father nor his and our kitchen garden has been in the same place
01:28since before the Civil War and it gets better every year rather than worse.
01:33I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
01:44My grandmother taught me this with a spade when I was about thirteen and I had done it to myself.
01:50There was a strip along the north side of her kitchen garden that grew weeds faster than anything else on
01:56the place
01:56and I got tired of it.
01:58Out behind the shop there was a roll of old oil cloth, the heavy kind,
02:02and one spring I laid it the whole length of that strip and weighted the edges with stones.
02:08It worked.
02:09All summer that strip was clean and I was proud of it.
02:12The next spring I went to pull it up and put the bed in and the ground underneath did not
02:17look right.
02:18It was pale.
02:20It was hard.
02:20When I put the spade in it came up in slabs.
02:24She came down and looked at it and did not say a word about the oil cloth.
02:28She told me to take one spadeful out of that strip and set it on the path.
02:33Then she walked me twenty feet to the fence row where the leaves had blown in and piled up for
02:38as long as anybody could remember
02:40and she had me take a spadeful there and set it beside the first one.
02:44I stood over them and looked.
02:45The first was gray and tight and there was nothing alive in it.
02:50Not a worm, not a root hair, nothing.
02:52The second was dark, nearly black, and it fell apart in my hand and there were worms in it and
02:58it smelled like the woods after rain.
03:01She let me look a good while.
03:02Then she asked me which of those two I had made.
03:05Ground is made from the top down.
03:07Put a lid on it and you have stopped the only thing that was making it.
03:11Before I take it apart, I want to be square about why it looks so convincing in year one
03:16because it is not that people are foolish for buying it.
03:19In the first season, it genuinely does work.
03:22The soil below has weed seed in it and that seed sprouts and finds a lid over its head and
03:28dies there.
03:29That is real and it is the thing you paid for.
03:33The trouble is only this.
03:34That seed in the ground was a finite lot and it was going to run out in two or three
03:39seasons of mulching anyway.
03:41Meanwhile, the fabric has begun the four things below and none of them show until year three.
03:47So the product works exactly as long as the sales pitch needs it to and fails on a timetable nobody
03:54is around to see.
03:55Now let me tell you exactly how that cloth fails because it fails in four separate ways and most people
04:01only ever notice the first one.
04:03The first is the reeds themselves and the reason is almost funny once you see it.
04:09Nobody leaves the fabric bare.
04:11You cover it with chips or bark because bare fabric is an ugly thing.
04:17Now those chips sit up there in the weather and chips rot.
04:21Add the dust that blows in, the leaves that fall, the bits of everything
04:26and inside two years you have an inch or two of fine, dark, crumbly material lying on top of that
04:34cloth.
04:35That is a seed bed.
04:37A perfect one.
04:38Better than the soil underneath it and better drained.
04:42The wind brings seed the way it always has and it lands on that lovely layer and germinates
04:48and now you have weeds growing on top of your weed barrier.
04:53And when you go to pull them, their roots have gone down into the weave of the cloth
04:58and knitted into it and they will not come out clean.
05:02You get the top and leave the root and you fight the same weed all summer.
05:07Meanwhile, the perennial weeds that were already down there,
05:11the bindweed and the quackgrass and the fissile,
05:14do not care about your cloth in the slightest.
05:16They find every slit you cut, every overlap, every edge,
05:22and they come up through it or around it.
05:24So within a few years, you have more weeds than you started with
05:28and they are harder to pull than they used to be.
05:31And there is a second helping of the same joke waiting for you around the edges.
05:37Wherever you cut a slit to set a plant in, you have made a little bare opening
05:41and every seed that blows across that bed eventually finds one.
05:47So the weeds come up in a tight ring right at the crown of your perennial,
05:52which is the single worst place in the garden to be weeding
05:55because you cannot get a fork in there without going through the roots of the thing you are trying to
06:00keep.
06:01And your perennial itself is in a hole that never gets any bigger.
06:06Three years on, it wants more room at the crown than the slit allows
06:11and the fabric is holding it in like a tight collar.
06:14The second failure is water.
06:17And here I want to correct something that gets said about this.
06:20Most of this material is not a solid sheet.
06:23It is woven, and when it is new, water does go through the weave.
06:29That is true, and I will not pretend otherwise.
06:32The trouble is what happens after.
06:35Fine silt and dust and rotted down chip work into that weave from above,
06:41and within a season or two, it is plugged.
06:44Now rain lands on it and runs sideways to the low spot
06:49instead of soaking down where it fell.
06:51Your plants sit in dry ground under a wet mulch,
06:55and you cannot understand why they want watering all the time.
06:59The third failure is the one my grandmother showed me, and it is the largest.
07:04When you mulch with chips or straw or leaves,
07:08and there is nothing between them and the soil,
07:10those chips rot at the bottom where they touch the ground.
07:14The worms come up under the mulch at night,
07:17take that rotted material down into their burrows,
07:20and leave their castings behind.
07:23That is how a bed gets darker and looser and better
07:26every single year without anybody adding a thing.
07:30That is how the fence row got black.
07:33Put a sheet across the top, and none of it can happen.
07:37The mulch rots up there and stays up there.
07:40The worms below have nothing coming down to them
07:43and very little air, so they move out.
07:46The soil under that cloth does not improve for as long as the cloth is there,
07:51and it slowly goes the other way,
07:53which is exactly what I dug up with the spade.
07:56And there is something else that goes with the worms leaving,
08:00which you will notice without knowing why.
08:02Bare fabric under thin mulch heats up in July
08:06in a way that open ground does not.
08:09Your soil under there runs hotter and drier than the bed next to it,
08:13and shallow-rooted things sulk in it.
08:17People blame the summer.
08:18It was the cloth.
08:20The fourth failure is the day you try to get rid of it.
08:23Tree and shrub roots do not just grow under that fabric.
08:27They grow up into the weave and through it and grip it,
08:31and after a few years, the cloth is stitched to your garden by 10,000 roots.
08:37There is no lifting it.
08:39You cut it into strips and haul,
08:41and every strip tears roots as it comes,
08:44and you are wounding the very plants you laid it down to help.
08:49The old sun-rotted stuff is worse
08:51because it comes up in shreds and tatters,
08:54and you will be picking black threads out of that bed for the next 10 years.
08:59Some of it you never get.
09:00It shreds down finer and finer and stays in the ground,
09:04and it is not going anywhere in your lifetime or your children's.
09:09Now, I will be fair to the material
09:11because there are two places it genuinely earns its keep.
09:15Under a gravel path or a stone walk or a driveway,
09:19laid on bare ground with the stone on top,
09:22it does good work.
09:24It keeps the stone from sinking down into the mud
09:27and the mud from working up into the stone,
09:29and no living thing is trying to grow there anyway.
09:33And laid out flat and left bare,
09:35on a nursery bench or a working yard where you sweep it off,
09:39it does stop weeds
09:41because nothing ever gets the chance to build a seed bed on it.
09:45Notice what both of those have in common.
09:48Nothing is growing there,
09:50and nothing is covering it.
09:52The moment it goes in a garden and gets covered,
09:55every one of those four failures starts on the clock.
09:59So what do you use instead?
10:01And here is the part that makes the whole thing plain.
10:05Cardboard.
10:06Plain brown cardboard, tape and labels pulled off.
10:11Knock the weeds down,
10:13lay the cardboard flat with the pieces overlapping a good hand's width,
10:18wet it through so it lies down and starts to soften,
10:21and put three or four inches of chips or straw or shredded leaves on top of it.
10:27It does exactly what the fabric was supposed to do.
10:30It blocks the light,
10:32and the weeds underneath die off for want of it.
10:35And then, four to six months later,
10:38it is gone.
10:39It has rotted into the ground,
10:41and the worms have taken it down,
10:43and it has left your soil better than it found it.
10:47There is nothing to pull up in five years,
10:50and nothing to shred in the dirt.
10:52Same job, opposite outcome.
10:55And the whole difference is that one of them roths,
10:58and the other one does not.
11:01A word on the cardboard itself since people ask.
11:04Plain brown is what you want.
11:06Pull the packing tape off,
11:08because tape does not rot,
11:10and you will be picking it out of that bed for years.
11:13And pull off any shiny printed labels.
11:17A little printing on plain board is nothing to worry about.
11:21Overlap the pieces properly,
11:23a hand's width at least,
11:24because every gap you leave is a chimney for a weed to come up.
11:28And wet it as you go rather than at the end,
11:31or the first breeze will have it across the yard.
11:35For an ordinary bed,
11:36you do not even need the cardboard.
11:39Three or four inches of straw,
11:41or shredded leaves,
11:42or wood chips,
11:43laid on the bare ground,
11:44is enough to keep most annual weeds from ever seeing daylight,
11:48and it feeds the ground while it does it.
11:51Keep it pulled back a couple of inches from the stems of your plants,
11:55and off the bark of a tree,
11:57because mulch piled against a stem holds damp there and rots it.
12:03And keep the wood chips on top where they belong.
12:06Chips lying on the surface are a fine thing.
12:10Chips dug into a bed will tie up the nitrogen in that soil,
12:14while they break down and starve whatever you planted.
12:18And there is the matter of what to put on top,
12:20because they are not all the same,
12:23and people use them in the wrong places.
12:26Straw is the best thing there is for a vegetable bed.
12:29It is light,
12:30it lets rain through,
12:32it rots down by autumn into something your soil wants,
12:35and it is pale,
12:37so it does not bake the ground.
12:39Get straw and not hay if you can,
12:42because hay carries seed,
12:44and you will be growing a crop you did not plant.
12:48Shredded leaves are free,
12:49and they are the closest thing to what the woods does on its own.
12:54Run the mower over a pile of them,
12:56and they will not mat down the way whole leaves do.
13:00Wood chips belong on paths and around trees and shrubs,
13:04where they last a good long while,
13:06and nothing is being replanted.
13:09Grass clippings work if you let them dry a few days first,
13:12and lay them thin.
13:14Thick and green,
13:16they turn into a hot, slimy mat,
13:18that water will not pass.
13:20Now the plain limits,
13:21because I am not selling you anything either.
13:25Mulch does not stop bindweed,
13:27or quackgrass, or thistle.
13:29Nothing does except getting the root out,
13:32and that means a fork,
13:34and patience,
13:34and going back at it.
13:36Mulch does not mean no weeding,
13:39it means an hour a season rather than an hour a week,
13:42and the ones that do come are sitting in loose stuff,
13:46and lift out with two fingers, root and all,
13:49which is the part the fabric never gave you.
13:53Mulch can shelter slugs in a wet year,
13:56and if you have that trouble,
13:57pull it back a few inches from the plants you care about most,
14:00and let that ring dry out.
14:03And a deep mulch keeps the ground cool in spring,
14:06which is a fine thing in July,
14:08and a nuisance in April.
14:11If you are direct sowing early,
14:13rake the mulch off that row a week or two beforehand,
14:17and let the sun get at the soil.
14:19Then put it back once the seedlings are up.
14:22You will need to top it up every year or two as it rots,
14:25and that topping up is not a cost.
14:28That is the whole point.
14:30It is going somewhere.
14:32And if you have fabric in the ground now,
14:35you do not have to do it all in one weekend.
14:38Take out one bed a year,
14:40in the autumn when the ground is soft,
14:42and the plants are going dormant.
14:44Cut it into strips,
14:46work it loose,
14:47accept that you will damage some roots,
14:49and put chips straight down on the bare soil after.
14:53That bed will be better the following spring,
14:56and you will feel it under the spade.
14:59There is no scheme in any of this,
15:01and nobody arranged anything.
15:04The money simply runs the other way.
15:06A roll of fabric with staples
15:09runs you $50 or $60,
15:11and gets bought again in five years
15:13when it fails.
15:15Cardboard is free from behind any shop in town,
15:18and leaves nothing behind to sell you again.
15:22The landscapers are not hiding a thing from you either.
15:25They lay it because it looks finished
15:27the day they drive away,
15:29and that is what they were hired for.
15:31It is only that nobody makes a living
15:34telling you to flatten a box,
15:36so nobody says it.
15:37And a thing nobody has a reason to say
15:40gets forgotten inside of one generation.
15:42What got lost was not a product.
15:46It was my grandmother walking a boy
15:48twenty feet to a fence row
15:50and making him hold two spadefuls
15:53of his own ground side by side.
15:56One more thing,
15:58and it is a small kindness
15:59to whoever comes after you.
16:01If you do put something under stone on a path,
16:05write down where it is.
16:07A note on a card in a drawer
16:09or told to somebody.
16:11A great many people find fabric in their gardens
16:15that they never laid
16:16and cannot account for,
16:18and they have to work out the hard way
16:20where it runs and how far.
16:23My grandmother's oilcloth was mine,
16:26and I knew where every inch of it went,
16:28which is the only reason getting it out
16:31took an afternoon rather than a summer.
16:34So here is what I would have you do this week,
16:37and it costs nothing at all.
16:39Go and do what she made me do.
16:42Take one spadeful out of your worst bed,
16:46the one you have been fighting.
16:48Then find the neglected corner of your place
16:51where leaves have been piling up for years
16:53behind a shed or along a fence,
16:56and take a spadeful there.
16:58Set them side by side on the path
17:01and look at the color of them,
17:03and crumble both in your hand.
17:06Nobody has to tell you which one is right.
17:08You will know in four seconds,
17:11and you will know what has been making it,
17:13because nobody has been down there
17:15doing a thing except the leaves.
17:18Tell me in the comments what county you are in
17:21and what kind of ground you have,
17:23clay or sand or loam.
17:26And tell me this as well.
17:28Do you have landscape fabric in your garden right now,
17:31and how long has it been in?
17:34I have a notion the answers are going to sort themselves neatly
17:37into the people who put it down last year
17:40and the people who have been trying to get it out for 10.
17:44Next time I want to show you how we mulch the whole garden,
17:47every bed and every path,
17:50out of things that cost nothing
17:52and turn up on their own.
17:54Leaves, straw, spoiled hay, grass,
17:58chips off a tree man who is glad to be rid of them.
18:02Where each one belongs,
18:04how deep it goes,
18:05and when to put it down.
18:07Ground is made from the top down.
18:09Put a lid on it,
18:10and you have stopped the only thing that was making it.
18:13The people who built this country with their hands knew that,
18:17and we are only just starting to remember it.