🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com Somebody sold you a roll of black cloth and told you it would end your weeding. So you spent a Saturday on it. Pulled the bed out, raked it level, rolled the fabric down and pinned it with those little staples, cut your slits, set your plants, and barrowed chips over the lot until it looked like the front of a bank.

The first year was wonderful. The third year there were a good many weeds and they would not pull properly. By the fifth that bed had more weeds than it ever had before you started, and the black edges were curling up out of the chips.

That fabric never was a weed barrier. It was a barrier, and the weeds are the one thing it does not stop for long. What it stops is everything that makes ground good.

My grandmother taught me this with a spade when I was thirteen and had done it to myself with a roll of old oilcloth. The next spring the ground under it was pale and hard and came up in slabs. She said nothing about the oilcloth.

She had me take one spadeful out of that strip and set it on the path, then walked me twenty feet to the fence row where leaves had piled up for as long as anybody could remember and had me take another and set it beside the first. One was grey and tight with nothing alive in it. The other was nearly black, fell apart in my hand, had worms in it, and smelled like the woods after rain.

Then she asked me which of the two I had made. What we go through: Why it genuinely does work in year one, and why that is the problem rather than the proof How the mulch on top rots down into a perfect seed bed, so weeds grow on top of your weed barrier Why those weeds will not pull clean, and why the ring around every slit is the worst weeding in the garden The water correction most people get wrong: it is woven and it does pass water, until the weave silts up What the worms were doing under an ordinary mulch, and why they leave Why your soil under there runs hotter and drier than the bed beside it What happens the day you try to take it out, and why roots grow into the weave and grip it The two places it genuinely earns its keep, and what they have in common Cardboard: same job, opposite outcome, and the whole difference is that one of them rots Straw, leaves, chips and grass clippings, and which belongs where How to get fabric out of a garden you already have, one bed a year The plain limits: mulch does not stop bindweed, quack grass or thistle, and nothing does except getting the root out with a fork and patience.

Mulch does not mean no weeding. It means an hour a season instead of an hour a week. And you will top it up every year or two as it rots, which is not a cost.

That is the entire point. There is no scheme in any of this. A roll with staples runs fifty or sixty dollars and gets bought again in five years when it fails.

Cardboard is free from behind any shop in town. The landscapers are not hiding a thing either, they lay it because it looks finished the day they drive away, and that is what they were hired for. Nobody makes a living telling you to flatten a box.

This week, take one spadeful out of your worst bed. Then find the neglected corner where leaves have been piling up behind a shed or along a fence and take another. Set them side by side on the path and crumble both in your hand.

Tell me in the comments what county you are in and what kind of ground you have, clay or sand or loam. And tell me this: do you have landscape fabric in your garden right now, and how long has it been in? Next time I want to show you how we mulch the whole garden, every bed and every path, out of things that cost nothing and turn up on their own.

I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #Gardening #LandscapeFabric #WeedBarrier #Mulch #NoDig #SoilHealth #Homesteading #OrganicGardenin...