The Most Crucial Piece To My Gardening Success: Reused Greenhouse Flooring

Even Kula, the kooky Quarter Horse, sees the value of the most amazing weed block fabric

One year, Doug, the creator and bringer of the most amazing tomato cages gifted me with perhaps the single greatest piece to my gardening success. Well, at the very least he has contributed to my continued sanity regarding the issue of weed control. What is this balm that provides a calm for my soil-encrusted soul? Used greenhouse flooring.

I have tried all manner of weed-block and weed-blocking strategies over the years. Straw mulch, pine mulch, weed blocking fabric from hardware and big box stores (The kinds I tried were useless; weeds grew right through them), and ultimately, working my triceps into a jello-like consistency while trying to defeat the weeds that so blithely mocked me. I just could not keep up. Sure, on a small scale I was effective, but when one has a 1/4 acre of potatoes and 1/2 an acre of squash to keep weeded on top of a plethora of other crops, your demeanor can take a serious well-being hit.

Doug, in his thoughtful and quiet way, must have noticed my effort and struggle. On one of his many visits from Oregon he stopped by and I noticed he had a pile of what appeared to be a black fabric looking material in the back of his truck.

"I brought you something."

This was all that he uttered as he walked around and dropped the tailgate on his white F250 pickup truck. I scrambled into the back and turned to face him, my face no doubt colored with puzzlement and inquiry.

"It's old greenhouse flooring. My daughter works at a huge one, and they replace the floor every four years." he replied.

Doug had brought me a few thousand square feet of water and nutrient permeable, polypropylene, weed blocking, commercial greenhouse flooring material. I honestly was so giddy at that moment that I might have had to sit down on the wheel well to catch my breath! The existence of such a product was the thing that my weed free pumpkin patch dreams were made of!

The official name of this labor saving product is Heavy Duty Polypropylene Ground Cover. I'm always on the lookout for it in a used capacity as I tend to be a little bit on the frugal side. I also like to recycle things, and I am on my sixth year utilizing an already used product. There seems to be a lot of life left in some things that are thrown away.

Every year I unfurl the huge thirty foot wide sheets and drag them over my prepped soil. I tend to use pieces of field fence that I fashion into u-shaped spikes to pin the fabric into place. Okay, I also might throw some jack pine logs, rocks, and t-posts on it to help the fabric not blow away until the plants are established. I am very opportunistic when it comes to useful, available items for any specific purpose. I just cut holes in the fabric in the plant width and spacing dimensions that I need by variety, and in a few weeks I have a green, weed free garden paradise.

I don't use the fabric on every crop. Potatoes and corn I'm looking at you, so my life isn't completely weed free, but boy, did the existence and arrival of the fabric help me be able to keep up on everything.

I have around 300 lavender plants out in the north pasture, and this year I plan to propagate and plant more lavender in hopes of finally distilling essential oil on a much larger scale. As an experiment, I am going to plant a rather large chunk of the new plants in a field using the flooring for weed control. We'll see how that experiment plays out. That said, if I can't find any used ground cover; I will have to buy some of the flooring for that project, and had to search out a supplier. I haven't ordered from either of the following, so this is no way an endorsement, but here are a couple places that I found that sell the glorious product:

Grower's Supply

Greenhouse Megastore

See how the weeds taunt me at the fabric's edges!