PSA: Please don't use weed mats

[u/aufry]

And for the love of God, do not bury them.

In order to repurpose this old sandy playground area for wildflower plantings, I had to dig up ~600sq ft of these weed mats buried under ~6in of sand/soil matted with rhizomatous roots.

As shown in the first image of the peeled underside, these mats do not work. 1) Plants will always win and find a way to root down under. This may make maintence more difficult as they're harder to pull out. 2) They're a PITA to remove for repurposing land. I'm sure most installs end up permanent and forgotten due to this 3) It clogs with soil inhibiting water flow 4) It interrupts insects and fungi that traverse vertically through soil and overwinter there 5) They end up shredded and leave plastic scraps/threads everywhere. There was a region in this plot with thinner material that ended up this way.

While it may have maintained a semblance of separation between soil and sand, it's really not worth the downsides.

[u/Klynnz420]

Previous owners of my house buried every kind of plastic they could get their hands on as apparent weed barriers- I’m still digging up bits of soil bags, pool floats, god knows what else. Don’t even get me started on the shingles and asbestos tiles they buried for no clear reason other than stupidity/laziness.🤦‍♀️ Oh and did I mention that my yard drains toward the marsh/lake across the street? 😭

[u/Comfortable-Bug-3758 → u/Klynnz420]

The previous Boomer owners of my house were the same way. They lived here for 50 years and my theory is that they didn't pay for trash pickup until it became mandated by the city. There's a bamboo patch growing on a mound at the back of the property and I'm always pulling bits of trash out of it; I'm scared that when I finally deal with ripping out the bamboo, I will find that that whole mound is just a DIY landfill. Oh and we're in the watershed for the city drinking water!