(light music) >>Less maintenance in the garden is always a good thing, especially when it comes to weed control.
These simple cardboard boxes can help save you money and your back, keep you from bending over to weed quite so much.
Other areas of the farm, we actually use garden fabric or landscape fabric in certain areas to plant and keep weeds down.
This is an excellent alternative, as we all get lots and lots of packages to our homes.
You can keep these outta the landfill, and it's good for the environment.
You're not gonna be disturbing the soil.
And basically, all you need to do is flatten 'em out and layer 'em up.
This is a really earth-friendly way to do it, not only for keeping that cardboard outta the landfill, but also, you are not gonna be tilling.
So you're going to preserve that mycelium network through the mycorrhizal mat that's under there.
That helps to nourish your plants, and you're going to be very simply turning all of this vegetation into green manure to nourish your garden throughout the growing season.
And one thing you wanna think about is removing the tape.
You don't want those microplastics to enter your soil or your food through the soil.
You're going to overlap about six inches, once you take off all that tape.
So that's gonna be your mat.
It's going to suppress your weed growth.
And then, what we had happen last year was, basically, we had tree damage.
Instead of the tree company taking it off to dump it somewhere, I asked them to leave it on property.
So this is going to be your paths to walk on throughout your garden.
And we use old animal bedding here.
You're gonna wanna make sure that it's aged so that you're not going to burn your plants with the nitrogen, especially if you're using litter from a chicken barn.
Also, that'll help prevent illness in the kitchen by getting those germs onto your vegetables.
You don't wanna do that.
When you're planting potatoes or sweet potatoes, you can put them directly on top of the cardboard, mound them up.
If you don't have animal bedding, you can put some topsoil on there.
And when you're planting peppers, tomatoes, you wanna just make sure you get down below the cardboard once it's had a chance to do its thing and kill your weeds.
And plant those nice and deep.
You can also use these simple cardboard boxes underneath open-bottom raised beds.
It'll help keep the weeds from coming up through that raised bed, especially wiregrass.
That's the bane of a lot of gardeners' existence.
And it will break down naturally after about a year and a half underneath there suppressing weeds for ya.
Try this because it's very easy to do, and all you really need is a pair of scissors and to get rid of all that tape.
That's really it.
It's so simple.
I encourage you to try it out in the next coming season.
(birds chirping)