Our First Mistake

Well, as expected, it didn’t take long for our first mistake to happen. After we tilled the garden space, we wanted to cover the area with weed fabric. The time between tilling and when we will actually direct sow our seeds will be about 4 weeks, so I wanted a way to kill any remaining vegetation and block the weed seeds from germinating. My husband and I laid 600’ of Sunbelt black ground cover and secured it with 200 - 6” fabric staples. It looked awesome, until about 2 hours later when an early spring thunderstorm started to kick up and the wind easily tossed all the fabric off the rows like it had never even been secured. So, with deepening gray skies and approaching lighting we had to gather up the fabric as quick as we could and drag it to the garage. There was no way we could fight the wind to get the fabric laid back down and resecured. It would have to wait for the storm to pass.

Wind tossed weed fabric :-(

Lesson learned on this one! Now I completely understand why those that use the fabric secure it by covering the edges with dirt. This keeps the wind from getting up under the fabric and creating the mess we had! My husband bought 12” staples to try, but I’m not sure that is going to help. It won’t keep the wind from getting under the fabric edges and getting the 6” staples past some of the rocks was hard enough. We’ll figure something out!