How to Install Weed Barrier Cloth

By eHow Home & Garden Editor

Rate: (16 Ratings)

Keep weeds at bay without chemical sprays or laborious hoeing and pulling. Blanket your garden beds and borders with mesh fabric mulch that lets air and water into your plants while suppressing weed seedlings.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

Garden Spades
Gardening Gloves
Mulch
Weed Barrier Mat
Weed Killers
Pencils
Graph Papers

Step1

Choose the planting areas you wish to cover and measure them in square feet. You can use weed barrier cloth on any bed, except those you replant often with annual flowers or vegetables.

Step2

Sketch any existing plants on a graph-paper drawing of the area so you'll know where to leave openings. Get all the weeds out. Pull up small weeds or spray them with a glyphosphate weed killer (such as Roundup or Finale). Pull and dig out woody and big grassy weeds, then let them sprout again and spray them at their first reappearance.

Step3

Wait a week or 10 days for the sprays to work, then remove the weeds, turn them under or compost the debris. Be aware that the more weeds you remove now, the more effective the cloth will be.

Step4

Buy mesh fabric by the roll and cut it yourself, or have pieces cut to fit your bed's sections, plus 6 inches all around. Do not overbuy - get enough to overlap no more than 1 inch where the fabric edges meet each other in the bed.

Step5

Lay cloth over your cleared soil with 6 inches of excess to use as an anchor. Bury the cloth at the edge of the bed, in a trench or under permanent bed edging. Use an attractive mulch such as pine straw, bark or even gravel on top of the cloth to hold it in place.

Step6

Rake the mulch back annually and inspect the cloth for shifting. Pull it back into place and replace the mulch.

Tips & Warnings

For even greater weed control, add a layer of pre-emerge herbicide to a cleared bed before installing fabric.
High-quality weed barrier cloths should last at least five years, even in the harshest climates.
To add a new plant after mulching with fabric, cut a circle in the cloth or slice an X and fold it back to make room.
Do not use weed killers that sterilize the soil in a flower bed.