Since we’re answering common questions, the next big question we get asked is “What is that black material on your beds?”
That’s weed fabric. And not just any weed fabric. It’s possibly the very best weed fabric one can buy. Specifically, it’s DeWitt Pro 5 20 year fabric. We’ll warn you, before you look it up, it’s expensive. But, it’s worth every penny.
This type of protection has a multitude of benefits for the northern garden. First and foremost, it stops almost all weeds and grasses from growing in our beds extremely well. It also acts as a mulch, which provides us significant water retention by highly reducing evaporative effects. Lastly, since it’s black, it also works to absorb heat into our beds similar to IRT plastic.
For the uninitiated, not all weed fabrics are the same. The cheap stuff, like you’ll find at big box stores and most nurseries, is not worth the money. They last a season or two and then shred to pieces. Plus, it barely works to stop weeds from growing. Professional weed fabric is weighed in ounces, effectively telling you the strength of the weave and material. Higher weights mean it’ll last longer and provide better protection from weeds. You typically find this “pro grade” stuff at major greenhouse suppliers and landscape supply houses.
This is our seventh season with this same fabric and it’s still holding up very well. We literally shift the fabric from bed to bed each season to rotate our crops, restaking it each time, so we are treating it pretty much as poorly as possible.
We recently did a price check on this stuff. Today, it’s nearly $450 for a 250 foot roll! Plus, if you’re shipping to Alaska, whatever that insanity costs! But, we’ll tell you, when we run out? It’s not even a question. This stuff saves us so much time from weeding. That time is incredibly valuable to us and we’re at the point in life where we’ll happily trade money for time. It’s a bonus that it also significantly improves our crops!
You’ll note that we cover our beds, not our walkways. It’s our plants that are sensitive to competition from other plants, not us humans. We don’t seek the perfectly manicured garden, rather a productive one. Plus, we can easily deal with those weeds in our walking paths using a loop hoe or weed eater, as there’s no precision required.
Like many equations in life, you can blow a little bit of money, get an inferior product and then keep having to buy that inferior product. Or, you can bite the bullet, drop some coin and truly solve the problem. We’ll just say that we’ve learned things the hard way!
