A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2006 Phase one completed

I haven't been very happy about not having space outdoors to do much gardening, so I have decided to create a garden space. There is a flat area at the base of the stairs to our front door that has a little tree and was surrounded by dead grass. I took out all the grass and now have a much bigger area to work with. I call it phase one of my outdoor garden project. I was wondering though if I should put down some plastic before replacing the dirt with new soil so that if there are any weed roots left they won't be able to grow into my new garden. Has anyone tried this before? I just wanted to get some advice before I proceed with laying new soil. I also decided it would look nice to have a border around it but was unhappy with what I could find in the stores, so I went to the beach and brought home a bunch of big rocks to make a border with. As I progress with this little project of mine, I will post pictures. Also, does anyone know of a good place to get bulbs that isn't over priced? Any advice would be helpful.

The only bit of advice I would say is,
if I did it, I wouldn't put PLASTIC, maybe some kind of landscape fabric *heavy duty* but not plastic..
The plastic will hold moisture/water and unless you were having plants that like wet feet, I don't think much would be tooooo happy...

I agree with Weezie, I wouldn't use plastic. Newspaper or cardboard would work well too, and eventually decompose into the soil below to make it better. Also, have you ever heard of Lasagna Gardening? That would work very well, too! (And it's very easy!)

Duh (smacks self on forehead ), I didn't think of plastic not allowing moisture to drain. Thanks, Weezie, for pointing that out to me before I made a really dumb mistake. I think I just won't put anything under the new soil. If weeds come out then it will give me something extra to do.

I've used the Professional Grade landscaping material in some of my beds and it had worked very well! However, I'm finding as I keep ammending my soil it is much looser and the weeds are quite easy to pull out.

I get most of my bulbs at Lowes, Home Depot and Wal-Mart and feel their prices are very reasonable.

Chermoni, I'm sure looking forward to seeing some of your pictures.

chermoni, I did a similar thing. We had a beautiful patch of grass on the sunny side of the house (prettiest grass we had), that I dug up, tillered up, put down newspaper, and put out seeds. This is the area I'm referring to when I talk about my flower garden. Even with the newspaper, which I've replaced many times, mulch, and at times I've resorted to Roundup, the weeds never go away. I've tried to seeds heavily to choke out the weeds, but hey, they're weeds. If there is a tiny space between your paper you will have grass or something you don't want popping up in that space. I haven't figured out how some people keep their gardens spit shined. I can't seem to do it. But every year I have different kinds of flowers, that I didn't plant, showing up as well and it makes it worth the effort.

I've never used landscaping material. Really! I dug out 1000 square feet of grass area around the deck and flag pole area last fall and planted bulbs and have tilled it up a few times around the plants this year with my small mantis, and worked in compost and peatmoss here and there, and have had no grass or weeds (an occasional weed of course) come through. I dug up the grass, then Neil got some topsoil from the field and put it on top that I mixed the compost and peatmoss in with. That's all.