Weed Control Fabric

After last year when the weeds became too much for us, we have tried to minimise the weed area using weed control fabric. We seem to have acquired two types, one was cheap polythene from Tesco and the other was thicker matting from a garden centre.

The thicker matting seems to be better at letting water through, and will probably last more than one season.

The above two pictures show onions and peas

The problems we have seen with weeks control fabric are :

• holding the fabric down with wind and chickens moving it about

• weed still growing under the fabric and lifting it up in the middle - how to remove these weeds

• how to remove the root veg from under the fabric once they have grown

over the winter, I really should have covered the ground in mulch and tarpaulin to stop the weed kicking off. Maybe next year

Peas And Tomato Plants

Today we planted out the pea, deciding that it was still too early to plant out the beans. We are experimenting with weed control plastic. There seems to be at least two types of weed control fabric, cheap this polythene with small holes and thicker cloth-like fabric that probably lets water through slightly better.

We have also put some wire fence above the peas so that they have something to grow up.

The peas and runner beans were grown from seed inside the conservatory, and planted out on the 15th of April.

We have also grown a selection of tomato plants from seed and they have now been planted in the middle bed of the polytunnel. Hopefully we will have no more frosts this year, but if we do, the polytunnel should maintain the raised beds above freezing. We have some fleece just in case.

This is a quite old picture of the inside of the polytunnel, the washing machine has now gone and it's all been tidied up a bit. More photos to come.

All this work in the garden is just what I need when recuperating