Learning About Landscaping Materials

Posted on: 17 June 2016

When you are working on your yard's landscaping, there can be nothing more frustrating than battling weed growth. To help you with your landscaping war on weeds, here are some tips for using weed barriers in your garden and during installation of a new gravel walkway.

Help Prevent Garden Weeds

Because it can be difficult to spray for weeds in your garden without harming your garden plants, it is useful to install landscape fabric as a weed barrier. But, be sure you install and use it correctly to get the most from it. 

Landscape fabric is a woven material, which allows water and air to seep through to the soil, but blocks sunlight, preventing weed growth. Be sure when you install it in your garden, lay it with the shiny side up and the fuzzy side down. The fuzzy side of the fabric helps the fabric adhere better to the soil.

When you install the fabric around existing garden plants, use scissors to cut a circular hole from the fabric to fit around each plant's stem. If you need to overlap lengths of landscape fabric to cover large areas, make sure the fabric overlaps by one foot. This is to help prevent any weeds from growing through the openings and into your garden. Then, secure all edges of the landscape fabric onto the soil by spacing and inserting landscape fabric pins every foot. 

Trim the edges of the fabric to the shape of your garden, then spread a three-inch layer of mulch over the landscape fabric. For mulch, you can choose from materials such as shredded bark and wood chips. 

Install a Weed-Free Gravel Walkway

When you take the time to install a gravel walkway in your yard using the right process and plan, you will be more successful at avoiding weed growth in the years to come. 

Using contractor's spray paint, mark off the outline on the ground for your new walkway. With a shovel or a Bobcat or skidsteer for larger areas, remove four inches of soil from your walkway surface area. This will provide space for you to pour and install the gravel layers of the walkway. 

As a base for your walkway foundation, pour a layer of two and one-half inches of crushed stone pack. Crushed stone pack is a mixture of stone dust and three-fourths-inch stones. Use a hand tamp to compact the crushed stone to create a hard, smooth layer approximately two inches thick.

Next, lay down a layer of landscaping weed barrier plastic over the gravel, to extend to the sides of the walkway area. Because your gravel walkway will not house any vegetation or plants, you can use landscape plastic as a lining material that will not allow water or air to seep through. Landscape plastic is a black-colored plastic that will smother out all weeds by preventing sunlight, water, and air from reaching and germinating any weed seeds. In fact, the dark color of the plastic will heat up under the sun's light to scorch and kill any weeds that are growing beneath its surface.

Install walkway edging along the sides of the walkway and to cover the edges of the landscape plastic. For edging, you can use paving bricks, pressure-treated wood, or stones, which will be set over the edge of the landscape plastic to hold it in place. You can also use plastic decorative edging, which you tamp down into the edges of the landscape plastic to hold it in place. Over the landscape plastic weed barrier, pour a layer of pea gravel, or other type of decorative gravel for your walkway. Make sure the gravel layer is slightly lower than the edging to prevent it from spilling over the edging.

Use this information to help you win the war on your landscaping weeds. Contact a landscaping company like Bill and Dave's Landscape for more information.