Using Paper Grocery Bags as Weed Barrier in the Garden
Every year we plant a garden and it does great in April, May, and early June. But come late June and early July things would normally start to slip. Usually, by the time we’d get to mid-July the weeds were out of control and I’d given up on everything but our berries and any pole beans that out-raced the weeds. Mr. Fix-It would till between the rows and big spaces to help me keep up, but by the end of July our garden was a goner.
It’s terrible to admit to being a gardening failure when you’re a farmer! But for several years it was the same story. But I’ve hit on a few things that really helped us get it back under control the last couple years, and most of them are pretty frugal.
One of them is to use brown paper bags from the grocery store as a weed barrier. Simple, effective, frugal–actually FREE.
We do our grocery shopping in our truck 90% of the time, which means my backseat is full of farm kids {smile} and groceries have to go in the back. I don’t know if you’ve ever had groceries in plastic bags loose in the bed of your truck while driving home, but let me just say…NO. Always a mess. Thankfully, our grocery story doesn’t charge extra for paper bags! They stand up neatly and hold everything together at the tailgate–as long as you don’t drive like a crazy-person!
So our kiddos are well-trained to always say “May we have paper, please!”
Then we get home and I stash them in the mudroom. All of them. We use them for firestarters. For packing up donations. For carrying boots while traveling. {smile} And for the gardening trick I’m about to show you.
This is a baby pepper plant on the verge of being overwhelmed by weeds in our garden…
STEP ONE
When you’re first starting out, you want to weed real good all around the plant in the row. Pull back any mulch you might have already put in place. Pluck out all your crabgrass runners. Get everything out of there.
If you’re really good, you would just lay the paper bags when you put the plants in. But I’ve got three “helpers” every time I plant a couple of rows and just getting the plants safely in the ground is our real gardening step one. Then momma takes a coffee break! {smile}
STEP TWO
Soak all your brown bags in a bucket of water. You can do this at the same time you’re doing the weeding. You can soak a lot or a few at a time. But you want to make sure they are wet all the way through.
This is a great job for little garden helpers. They love splashing around in the water.
STEP THREE
Pull your bags out of the water and lay them out like a mat all around your plants. You can put them right up against the base of the plant. It’s ok if the bags rip while coming out of the water. You might need to rip them up anyway to fit the space you have. Don’t worry about overlapping the paper. You can make the layer as thick as you want, depending on how many bags you have. Having coverage is more important than having depth.
STEP FOUR
Cover the paper bags up with mulch. You can see here that we use pine straw for mulch for about half the year. We have a pine tree farm, so we have lots of pine straw available. {smile} You can use whatever you have available. Plain straw will work fine as well and we use that the second half of the year. I just recommend something organic that will help your garden soil as it breaks down.
When I did this the first time, I went plant-by-plant, weeding, wrapping, and then covering. Now I do a whole row at a time.
STEP FIVE
When you finish, go back through the row and water everything real well again. The water does two things for your garden. One, it holds the paper down so it can do its job and smother the weeds. But two, it also provides water to your plants and the moisture stays in the paper much longer under that mulch than if it was open to the air.
In the picture below, you can see a finished section of peppers. You can also see the weeds around the Brussel sprouts on the right that haven’t been done yet.
Since it’s just paper, eventually the bag will break down and compost into your soil. That means that eventually your weeds will come back. {sigh}
So as the season progresses and things start to look like this around the edges…
It’s time to get out some more bags. But this time, just wet them and lay them on top. On top of the mulch. On top of the weeds. On top of everything but your plant. Make sure they are soaking wet, then put more mulch on top of the second layer and keep going. Eventually it all breaks down into your garden soil. Last year I had to re-layer bags and mulch about three times to keep control of the weeds. I’ve heard that over time you’ll kill off the weed seed growth and you’ll just have fewer and fewer weeds each year. Since I haven’t been a very good gardener up to this point, I’ve probably got a ways to go to see that happen!
So besides being frugal, being safe organic soil amendment, and being a waste-reducing reuse project, the other great thing about using brown paper bags is that it supports sustainable tree farms! {Here’s a great Op-Ed in Edible New Orleans about the impacts of using paper bags on the environment.}
I’ve heard that over time you’ll kill off the weed seed growth and you’ll just have fewer and fewer weeds each year. Since I haven’t been a very good gardener up to this point, I’ve probably still got a long way to go on that front. But we’ll be fighting the good fight and eating the good stuff again this year.
Do you have any great gardening or weed-fighting tips? We’ll be sharing more this month in our newsletter. And be sure to follow our Pinterest gardening boards for other great tips!
PIN FOR LATER!
I am totally sharing your blog with my oldest daughter. She has the heart of a homesteader.
{smile} I started out as a city girl with a heart for homesteading too!
Watch the Back to Eden Garden Film. It’s free on YouTube and I’ve not had to weed since laying the initial mulch. We have very sandy soil and extreme heat and humidity, so I lay down cardboard boxes (from all our Amazon orders) between the garden beds with mulch overtop. The carboard takes much longer to breakdown and the weeds tend to sprout under it and die. I do use paper bags too and they work well, but as you’ve said, decompose faster.
To go permanently weed and till free:
Pull all the weeds, add lots of compost all over the garden, lay cardboard through all the paths and around the edge of the garden. Use sticks or something to mark where your rows are. Deep mulch the whole shebang with dye-free preferably hardwood mulch or a free dump truck load from a local tree trimming service. You can then just move the mulch aside making a little bird nest shape in the mulch and plant your transplants right in with a scoop of compost and/or sprinkling of fertilizer. Your weeding days are now over!
You may need to add a couple inches of mulch every other year depending on how fast it composts on top of the soil, but seriously, you conserve massive amounts of water and never have to weed.
That sounds like a great idea–I’ll just have to find some better mulch. Pine straw that heavy can cause acidification. We do have a lot of timber production around here, so wood chips might be feasible if I find the right contact. Thanks for sharing!
Great tip! I’m going to have to try this in my garden! Thanks for sharing on Funtastic Friday!
Thanks for stopping by! This year we’re also going to try using it in our flower gardens when we re-mulch at the end of the season.
Thanks for joining us at Family Joy Blog linkup. We’ve done something similar with newspaper.Best wishes for few weeds this year!
Hoping that every year it gets better! 🙂
Great idea! Weeding is definitely the worst part of gardening. All that mulch is great for keeping the soil moist and conserving with water with the droughts everyone has been having too. Found your post at Thursday Favorite Things. Thanks for sharing.
We also add a lot of farm compost to our garden so we have GREAT soil right now. The weeds love it as much as the good plants, but if we can keep them under control, we have a very productive garden.
I do the same with my animal feed sacks (as in France everyone uses reusable bags for groceries) – and like you it helps keep me on top of the weeds that always sneak up when I look away for 5 minutes! #MMBC
PS – I host a monthly linky called Going Green and would love to see you link up if you wanted to – it’s open now! đź’š
That’s a good idea too. I think our feed bags have plastic in them so they would work, but wouldn’t be as green. I’ve started trying to turn some of our feed bags into tote bags because I hate the waste.
This is such good advice! We actually use feed bags (from pigs & cattle) which are thicker (about 4 ply at least) and are coated with a thin shiny film that I find takes longer to break down. The other thing that really helps defeat the weeds for us is to mulch chopped straw (dead leaves or bark would also work) between the rows. I’m a VERY lazy gardener!
I came to visit from Chicken Chick’s bloghop; I hope you’ll have time one day to visit the 4Shoes & let me know that you’ve been by.
Great tip. I will be planting soon and will think to ask for paper bags at the store. Thanks for sharing at #HomeMattersParty
Yes, we always ask for paper bags anyway. Plastic blows away or rips too easy. Our store doesn’t charge for that though, and I know some do.
Thank you for linking up with the #GoingGreenLinky. The next one opens on Mon May 1st and I hope you can join up again đź’šđź’š
i put the bagger on the lawn mower and us the grass clipping for my mulch over the newspaper or brown bags
That seems like it would work well, but our yard grass would be full of weed seeds. {smile}
Just came upon your site while shopping for paper mulch. I be been using paper shopping bags for years, as well as cardboard, and, principally, the black and white parts of newspapers because I have the most of that, but still not enough ( I put it down in books). The paper gets covered with leaves to keep it damp, and add biomass. Have used baled straw, but from this have grown VERY impressive tall straw grass. If I can get this cut before getting too big and tough with seed heads, I use this for mulch, too. But there’s never enough, which is why I am looking to buy. Have used “weed block” material in the past, which does not work well, and has to be periodically removed and trashed, which is a horrible waste of time, material and money. The view promulgated for many years that wood chips robbed nitrogen from the soil has, I believe, now been disproved. So, this should be helpful, as well as sometimes free. Also, the chopped straw someone mentioned earlier seems to have far fewer seeds, and is definitely easier to snuggle up around tender plants.
Keep on keeping on. Love your blog and will signup.
Thanks for stopping by. Those are great ideas!
We have done this with newspaper and compost to cover for the past 4 years at least. This year we would like to try paper bags. We do the whole row and around the bigger plants including the walking area between the rows. We run soaker hoses just along the plants. We have almost no weeds! Everyone is impressed at our garden.
That sounds awesome! I think the brown paper bags last a little longer than newspaper, unless you put it really thick. We still run the tiller through our walkways at the moment to control the weeds. And as we sow a second crop, we shift the planting rows over and the walkways become planting and the planting rows become the new walkway.
I have raised beds with pavers over the walk way in between. I have crazy weeds growing between the pavers. If I use some sort of natural weed killer there, do you think it would affect the soil in the raised beds at all?
Have you just tried vinegar? An occasional soil test in your raised beds would let you know if it’s hurting anything else, which you could easily amend for. I think anything you spray might bleed over a little bit, but it would have to soak in, travel through the soil under the raised beds, then up the soil layers into the roots of the raised bed plants. By that point, unless it’s been absolutely drenched, I would think it would be significantly diluted.
Hello this is Emma Henderson, the wellness intern of Baldwin County Schools Board of Education (a 501(c)(3) organization). Baldwin County Schools Board Office and Office of Nutrition have been hard at work on the 1.5-acre Garden Project at Baldwin High School. The garden will include several raised beds as well as row gardens and hydroponics, which will support a variety of vegetables, fruits, beans, herbs and flowers. The garden will promote STEAM-based learning by serving as an outdoor learning lab for all Baldwin County School students. The high school students that are a part of the Career Academy will be especially involved in all aspects of growing, harvesting, cooking the food that they grow. The food they cook will be sold to school staff in their little restaurant that will be set up in the school. They will also be selling the produce to community members at “pop-up farmers markets” that will occur at each school in the district. There is an alarming number of underprivileged families in the area, so it is extremely important that the kids be taught these valuable life skills in school to be better equipped to enter the field of work they choose.
In Baldwin county, we currently provide every child with two free hot meals a day during this school year as well as the summer because “hunger doesn’t take a vacation”. We even have buses go out into the community to feed these children as they would be left hungry otherwise. Although these children are getting free meals, we try our best to provide them with healthy produce. We heavily emphasize Farm-to-School initiatives to teach the students the importance of agriculture and healthy eating. Last year alone we served over 770,000 meals in which locally grown farm fresh food was offered. We would love for these children to become “local growers” themselves and help to make a positive contribution to better the community in which they live!
We were hoping that you might be as passionate as we are about providing this amazing opportunity for the children of Baldwin County and might be interested in donating weed block for our raised beds or other garden supplies to become a “Farmer Friend” and be featured on our webpage. Every donation, no matter how small, will be greatly appreciated by these kids. Monetary donations to purchase these items would be great as well!
Will using paper bags affect the spread of Allysium?
If you are referring to the flowering groundcover, I believe it might. I only use regular mulch or pine straw in most of my flower gardens, so I don’t know about the impacts on ground cover.
Have the pictures been removed? I don’t see any pics of your hard labor
Hey there! I don’t know what happened there, but the pictures are back. And you’re right, that’s a LOT of hard work! {smile}
hi there gardeners!
does anyone have definitive knowledge about the use of cardboard or paper for weed control being bad for vegetables because of the dioxins that are created during the paper making process?
i know brown paper is the colour of paper (sounds redundant) meaning it has never been bleached… but supposedly cardboard or paper that has even a small waxy surface can be harmful to the soil and produce?
i love paper and cardboard for weed control, but now worried it will affect my “organic” gardening efforts!
I don’t have any specifics on that, but I can imagine it could be possible in certain circumstances. I would expect the other issue would be that waxed surfaces wouldn’t break down over time and would not compost as paper or cardboard would. So, for example, we would not reuse feedbags for mulching our gardens. They don’t break down well and are full of plastic fibers and dyes.
thanks jamie! as an epic ocd and non-linear gardener, i seem to always find something to halt my grandiose plans and progress ;). organic gardening has always been my primary goal, even growing from organic and heirloom seeds i can collect. maybe i can use old cotton sheets instead of questionably manufactured paper? the search for cleaning the soil and earth continues!! happy growing!
Well, regarding organic choices–you know what else would work? Wool! If you could find raw wool you could layer that under straw as an organic weed barrier. One reason we don’t use it as often is that it doesn’t break down in one year, so it can get messy when you go to till everything over at the end of the season. But you could always gather it up and reuse it if it was still intact. For a lot of meat-lamb farmers it’s a waste product or only a very low-value product if you can find it. Or places like zoos, historic farms, nature centers, etc. that are shearing for animal maintenance instead of for a value-added product. Might be worth looking for.