Mulching with newspaper and cardboard

Tips, Tricks

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Anyone who has a garden or landscape bed will benefit from using mulch. It creates a barrier to prevent weeds from growing, retains moisture in the soil and adds organic material. An easy and inexpensive method to keep the weeds in the dark longer is to start with a layer of newspaper or cardboard. Be sure to overlap the edges to cover the soil entirely to prevent weeds and seeds from seeing the light. Cover with a layer of bark mulch or other organic material such as straw or grass clippings. See info regarding inks here: http://compost.css.cornell.edu/faq.html#newspaper

Comments

Put the newspaper in a wheelbarrow and pre-soak it so it doesn't fly around on you while you put it down.

thank you so much for this great tip.

Thanks for this video. It helped convince us to try it when you said the magic words 'Master Gardener'!

Dandelions are edible and violets are natural insect repellants (and I see somebody else said they're edible too)

Nothing is better in life than hiding your trash in your yard .

cat!

Carol...I have recently started using coffee grinds to enhance the soil in my gardens. Also...I started to think ...why not use the filter media as a mulch? Now... I take the grinds and filter out to the garden clear a little area and make a divot, invert filter and grinds into the earth, then recover with the cypress mulch. At the same time I pull weeds in the vicinity of my coffee grind infusion and with the same plastic grocery bag the grinds were carried in, I trash the weeds.
I am very lazy when it comes to spending a lot of time in the garden and this is all accomplished in 5 minutes or less during the process of me making my morning coffee.

the problem with this method, as well as using black plastic, or fiber matting, is that the weeds will start to grow in the mulch, plus the mulch turns into dirt, then y ou have a big mess.

what is you want to plant stuff though/// Can you still plant

It seems like a good idea but I'd stay away from newspapers with too many coloured images, at least for the veggie garden. And the glossy print on that cardboard is a no-no in my garden. Better safe than sorry. Nice vid though. And cute cat.

thank you for the very useful imformation!

i have a surplus of plastic mesh tarp. it is very permeable by water but virtually impenetrable by plants. it will not degrade over a short period of time but i cant imagine it would effect the soil. am i correct? if not, what are some other low cost mulching materials?

It's hard to separate the newspaper when it's wet.Wouldn't it make more sense to---lay the paper down first--then soak the newspaper??? Naturally on a windy day you would have to weight the paper down with dirt/rock first

This is back-breaking labor. Watching this video hurts my back. But I need to find a natural way to get rid of weeds. I've been using chemicals to kill the weeds, but it's toxic and causes cancer. I will try the newspaper method. This will stop my HOA from harassing me about the dandelions in my front yard. I can't have brown grass. But my water bill is very high. I'm very miserable living under the HOA rules. I need to sell my house and move out.

So I have weeds growing in my flowerbeds and lawn. My communist HOA ( Homeowners Associations) told me to remove all the dandelions in 30 days or pay a fine. I jump off my couch and start spraying my front yard with chemicals called Round-up. That was a bad idea. It killed almost every green plant I had. But I did got rid of that pesky yellow flowers they called weeds.

I like the wet newspaper method. I put in a mulch bed once and used newspaper to kill the grass, but I didn't wet it so it was a rush to cover the paper with mulch before the wind blew. I'm going to do this in my new garden. Thanks for the video.

"...the dry corn starch is mixed with water and other chemicals" I wonder what the other chemicals are? I would not use cardboard in a vegetable garden. Flower and shrub gardens would probably be okay.'

depending on your continent soil Newspaper and cardboard will deteriorate over time and worms and grubs will break it down. If mice can eat plastic containers in my garage, grubs can chew through cardboard. So might want to layer every season.

Newspapers also contain mercury in the ink. I wouldn't grow vegetables from it. Fertilizer grown foods are tasteless and also not good for your health it interrupts the plants normal genetic growing cycle, kind of like giving a six month old pup or human steroids.

When you mulch with newspaper or cardboard you do not need to remove the grass. Just mow it as close to the ground as you can and then place the paper over so it will shade and kill the grass and weeds, then cover it all with mulch. You will probably need to hand dig the root of the dandelion, violet or other tougher weed that decides to poke through. Be sure to get all the root and it won't come back. Happy Gardening!