ground cover fabric

i prefer not use it at all, plain cardboard overlapping layers instead and hold it down with wood chip mulch, every few years the mulch will need some topping off and perhaps if the weeds are stubborn you might need to scrape the mulch back and replace the cardboard, but it depends upon if the weeds seem to be coming through or not.

in places in some perennial gardens and around some trees we've done weed barrier fabric or other things (old carpeting) and pretty much it's become a mess that is now getting over- grown with weeds because it will take way too much work to redo it - an eventual mess IMO. some weed barrier fabrics break down so to remove them means picking all those pieces out. bleah... at least with cardboard it will rot away to humus along with some of the woodchips and then it becomes a valuable garden amendment.

we put rocks or pieces of wood along the edges to hold it down if it won't stay in place.

we don't have termite problems or fire risks here to worry too much about wood mulches. we do have the black carpenter ants so i do have to keep an eye out for them coming too close to the house and trying to set up new colonies in the walls. it's taken me nearly 30 years to get most of the cracks caulked up so they aren't coming in the house, but there's some places i can't get to so ...

songbird

Has to

Also, mulch on top of fabric beaks down in a few years and become the ideal medium for weeds.

I just found out that any perennials under the cover will poke through too. I am sensing that covering is a bad idea.

The goal is to control blowing dust.

T wrote: ...

at that point it becomes a garden amendment material and is replaced by new wood chips.

but for your application it won't work.

not if they're dead. if you do it right (a few layers of overlapping cardboard and a thick layer of wood chips on top will smother most perennials within a year, by the next year any that still have any energy left in their root systems you pull back the wood chips, cut off what is growing and repeat the process, i've not had any perennial weeds that survive into the third year if kept cut off and smothered for those first two years. we've also put the cardboard layers under weed barrier fabric and that also helps defeat persistent perennial weeds.

upwind wind breaks, large rocks, walls, substantial fencing, direct 100+ winds aren't going to be deterred by anything minor. even a very sturdy tree is going to have a hard time standing up to that.

basically at that point the overall siting of the place would be critical and i'd not want it put out in the open and otherwise be in the lee of a hill or some other natural features.

with fire risk trying to grow trees as a windbreak only works if the they are able to be planted quite a ways upwind.

improperly designed wind breaks can act as a channel and in the case of fires that would be like a potential blow torch, so that's far outside my experience.

for 100+ MPH dust storms you're not going to control that, you just have to build to survive that structurally and if you do put up wind breaks you probably need to think in terms of how they would respond to such large events. sand blown with that much force is going to scour pretty much anything growing - it'd have to be very tough to survive that...

songbird

I have come up with a workaround.

The goal was weed control and keeping blowing dust down.

The weed control I will be using is hydrolyzed corn gluten:

You can read how this works over at

And, checking with the manufacturer, the sealant action does keep blowing dust down.

I will have to spray several times a year, but I am going to have to do that anyway.

For securing ground cover fabric, I usually go for garden staples or pins. They're easy to use—just push them through the fabric and into the ground. Plus, they hold everything down pretty well, even in windy weather. Sometimes I'll also toss a few rocks or bricks on top for extra security, especially around the edges. It's all about finding what works best for your setup!

You can visit

Pins won't work. The ground is very, very hard and full on lake bottom rocks.