Amanda, this past Spring, after tilling the garden plot, we mulched a roughly 20’ by 30’ section with a rather shallow 4-5 inch layer of fine dark wood mulch. A fair amount of weeds and grass sprouted through that thin layer since we didn’t put a barrier layer underneath. I made a point of pulling all the sprouting stuff every few days to keep it under control. Toward the end of the season there were very few new weeds coming up. After all the plants were removed, I tilled the un-mulched portion of the garden and covered the entire area with a more coarse layer of chips from a couple local arborists, directly on top of the tilled area (previous picture). The only weeds that have sprouted are rooted in the mulch and not the underlying soil. We’re hoping that a covering layer of horse manure and more chips will speed the breakdown of the chips between now and planting season next year.
Dave, I built our existing planter boxes 5 or 6 years ago. I covered the bottom in 1/2” mesh hardware cloth to keep the moles out. I didn’t put any paper or cardboard underneath but weeds haven’t been a problem. The boxes are about 15” deep and filled to within an inch or so of the top. We grow peppers, tomatoes, and beets, carrots, lettuce and such in the boxes.
Amanda, no copperheads here. We have a few garter snakes and the occasional black snake. They’re usually living in the firewood ricks.
This is a portion of our garden in 2014. Pole beans on wooden trellis, planter boxes behind. I put wooden uprights on the ends of the planter boxes, drilled every foot to accept 1/2” metal conduit, to support the tomato and pepper plants. We picked 2-3 colander’s full of pole beans almost every day. Mrs canned 100 qts. of tomatoes off of 8 plants that year.
