Landscape fabric is an essential tool on our farm. We use it on multiple, important crops and in the past few weeks we've been prepping new runs of landscape fabric for this season and seasons to come. This weeks farm update, while seemingly a bit mundane, will go into all things landscape fabric.
First off, what is landscape fabric? Landscape fabric is woven plastic fabric rolls that are UV treated that can be used for a variety of farm and landscaping uses.The UV treatment is really important as many plastics will break down in sunlight over time. Instead of getting just 1 use out of the fabric we are able to re-use the fabric for 4-5 years before it needs to be replaced.
Why do we us landscape fabric? On our farm the primary use of landscape fabric is for weed prevention and to prevent soil from splashing up onto various crops on our farm. We've also noticed that landscape fabric can help reduce plant diseases that affect our crops.
Our standard landscape fabric run is 4' wide and 100' long to match our standard bed and tunnel length. When we were less experienced we tried cutting holes in landscape fabric with a knife but found out really quickly that method doesn't work well as the landscape fabric tends to defray. Instead, we use a torch and a plywood template to burn holes into the fabric. This is a pretty quick way to get a good sized hole without fraying. Since we plant different crops at different spacing we have different runs of landscape fabric for different crops. The main crops we use landscape fabric for are lettuce, tomatoes, peppers & strawberries. Shown below is a photo of the torch, template and a run of landscape fabric that's having holes added to it.
The biggest drawback of landscape fabric is the plastic itself. We recognize the problem that plastic presents in our modern society. The main advantage of plastic is also it's main drawback: that it doesn't readily break down in the environment. We're intently watching some of the bio plastics being developed and other alternative products but so far none of them have hit the sweet spot for easy of use and cost.
In some cases we've eliminated the use of landscape fabric in some crops. For example, we used to plant broccoli and cabbage in landscape fabric but we've found that with our walk behind cultivating tractor that we can keep or broccoli and cabbage weed free with that tool eliminating the need for landscape fabric in these crops.
