When we set out to build a farm five years ago, we pictured bountiful vegetable rows free of plastic mulch. We didn’t like the idea of laying out a field’s worth of petroleum-intensive plastic, only to throw it away at the the end of the season. We also felt that plasticulture (and this is totally anecdotal) created an environment less hospitable to the beneficial insects on which we rely so heavily for pest control.
But after four seasons of weeds literally up to our eyeballs, our position on the use of plastic for weed suppression has softened. While most of our mulched beds are covered in straw, we’re testing a plastic ground cover on a few heat-loving crops (peppers, eggplants, and melons) and a few oft-neglected crops that would never get weeded otherwise (sorrel, herbs).
Our hope is to get at least a few seasons out of this ground cover, with some cleaning and sanitizing in between. It’s a woven fabric, giving it greater stability, and the plant holes were burned to prevent fraying. Farming, of course, can be a little antagonistic toward the best laid plans, but we’re hopeful all the same. And, most importantly, we think the peppers will thank us for it.