Stop Weeds from Taking Over Your Garden

good day welcome to I cultivate my name's Steve today we're going to have a really quick look at one way in which we suppress weeds in our [Music] garden is it just me or is it actually the case that with the increase in online shopping that we just seem to accumulate so much cardboard and I know that for a fact with us we are seem to be accumulating a lot of cardboard I mean if you need to buy new white goods new televisions or just simply get things delivered to your house they seem to always come these days in cardboard packaging and that means we need to do something with that cardboard now one option of course is the recycling of that cardboard but what we've started to do is to use all of this cardboard that we accumulate to help with the suppression of weeds in our garden before you use this cardboard though the one thing I would recommend that you do is you remove all of the plastic tape that is often on it to seal up the boxes when they arrive at your house so you can see on this one here for example we've got plastic tape around the edges just remove that plastic tape because ultimately it's not going to break down in your garden and you'll be left with this tape in your garden so just remove it place that in the bin and then use the cardboard as weed suppression for your garden let's have a look at that now you can see in this particular garden bed we've had quite a bit of bracken fern and even a little bit of cooch coming through from time to time and while we pull this out it's a NeverEnding job it just keeps on coming back again and again and it's a lot of hard work to stay on top of it so what we are doing this time around is we're taking some of this cardboard and we are literally opening it up and we're going to lay it across the top now you will notice that I've overlapped it quite a bit in a few places and in addition to that we've sort of worked their way around um the various plants that we do want to make sure get what they need now you will have seen in other videos of mine that I've used different types of mulches at different times and I've even used the cardboard layering like we've done here in the no dig Garden you'll see a link to that particular video above appearing about now but in this particular inance what we are using for our mulch is um Australian hardwood uh chips and these chips are extremely long- lasting and while of course they are organic and they will uh break down eventually they will take to three even three years perhaps even in order to break down so in this particular instance we're going to be using hardwood chips now these hardwood chips are basically um sourced from our local landscape supplier so these are coming from a reasonably sustainable source so we're not concerned in that regard with regards to where these chips have come from so let's now get these wood chips over onto the cardboard and let's see the final um product so the question is really how deep should go with my Mulch and you can see while we still need to spread this out a bit further we're going quite deep and I would recommend that if your mulch is about weed suppression that you go at least 100 mm thick in other words 4 in in the old Imperial uh measurements at least 4 in thick and a little bit on the thicker side rather than shallower so we're just going to spread this around now and the other thing that I'm doing is I'm making sure that we don't get too much mulch built up around the base of the plants that we have in here cuz having soil or mulch built up around the base can induce um some diseases in those plants you know one other thing to be mindful of with the mulch that you you select is the impact that that mulch might have on the actual soil itself and specifically I'm referring to the pH often people will go along with a pine bark mulch which can be really quite good because it is extremely resilient takes a long time to break down and provides a certain aesthetic a certain look and feel to the soil as well but I just caution you with pine Mark mulch because it can also have an impact of acidifying your soil a bit so if that's not a problem well then go but just be mindful of the fact that the mulch that you choose can have an impact on the pH of the soil so we now have a nice thick layer of wood chip over the top of the cardboard and I really think that this is going to suppress the weed growth that comes through this garden bed into the future now of course we will still get the odd weed coming through we'll need to manually pluck those out as they come through but it will be much more under control than what it has been in the past the last thing that we're going to do in order to have this all going well is we're going to give it a good water in to enable it all to settle down to dampen the cardboard underneath because ultimately remember we do still want water to get through to the soil underneath and so that damping down is going to help with that now I hope you've enjoyed this video and it has given you some good ideas with regards to how to suppress weeds in your garden so can I please ask you to go down to the thumbs up and give us a thumbs up subscribe to this Channel and go to our website icultivate Donnet and become a member of the community thanks for watching