A berry good plan ?

We had a pretty nice strawberry patch until I let the grass get started . It soon overwhelmed the berries ... I considered using some black plastic as a weed/grass barrier , but was told that it wasn't a good idea for long-term . So I was out rearranging bee equipment and saw that roll of landscape fabric I bought to use as part of my cellar drainage system and thought it might work better . Put the fabric down and cover with mulch , poke holes for the plants and runners as they appear . The patch I want to use has been tilled , I was going to put lettuce/salad stuff there but ... That damn grass has been my biggest problem , I think I might be getting the upper hand with a combination of burning it when it's dry and covering the garden with straw mulch . I'll be getting everything together over the next few days , will amend the soil as suggested by the report , till the amendments in , and cover immediately with a thick layer of straw .

suggest a few layers of cardboard instead of weed barrier. why? because if you do not disturbed a well mulched garden much you should not have many weed seeds sprouting (including grasses from seeds). by the time the few layers of cardboard are rotted/ gone from worms then in that area any remaining roots should be done or nearly so and should be able to keep up with random sprouts. which will happen from birds/ants/worms/water/wind moving seeds around.

this has worked well for smothering almost every grass grown here. as long as the edges of the garden are covered to keep grasses from coming in from the sides... we have almost all grasses gone here, only about 5% left to go and i'll be happy when i can get rid of those too since they are the major source of weeds in neighboring gardens.

every few years strawberries tend to fade in productivity so the patch needs to be renovated anyways. if you keep it relatively weed free you can go through and just remove the older plants and let the younger ones continue. always a fun time thinning to keep them from overcrowding. i keep thousands of strawberry plants in several patches and try to go through one big patch each season to keep them productive, weeded, amended, mulched etc.

oh and by the way, they are not deep rooted plants so holes through fabric is largely a waste between the runners that will happily grow in the top layer of mulch and having a nice layer of mulch anyways (which will break down in time and turn into prime strawberry growing humus).

during hot weather have to keep an eye on moisture levels if they are flowering/fruiting.

i wish i had all of these inside the fenced gardens because the deer discover them once in a while and mow them down. chipmunks and birds will get some of them. i don't mind as long as they leave me a few.

songbird