Clearing land for new garden space can be truly back-breaking work. Use these tips for how to use the power of sunlight and black plastic to kill weeds instead. The method uses no chemical sprays, is easy to do, and keeps the soil structure intact. Once the plastic has had time to work and peeled back, you’re left with a clean slate of cleared land that you can begin growing on immediately. It’s an eco-friendly way to clear land without having to use herbicides.
Once you decide that you’re going to start a new garden or garden bed, the questions begin. The big one is usually around figuring out the best way to convert a lawn into a productive garden. It’s clear that you can’t plant directly into it since grass will outcompete crops. The soil probably also needs amending with organic matter, and to do that, all the vegetation must be removed. One way or another, you’re going to need to clear the land of everything currently growing on it. Instead of hacking away at turf or double-digging, the way that I recommend doing it is to use black plastic to kill weeds. It’s far easier and more effective than the alternative.
This is exactly how I created parts of my last two vegetable gardens and two large flower borders. Doing it this way saved me an incredible amount of time and energy! Using black plastic is the main way I recommend clearing land without using herbicides since it’s easy and suitable for organic gardening. The before and after photos below show how I covered an entire area and then gradually peeled the plastic back. Bit by bit, I transformed a weedy plot of land into a beautiful and productive veggie patch.
As the cold weather approaches, many gardeners debate whether or not to cover their garden beds with plastic sheeting for the winter months. Black plastic mulch can provide some benefits like warming the soil, blocking weeds, and potentially offering minor frost protection. However, it also has some significant drawbacks to consider. In this article, we’ll examine the pros and cons of using plastic to cover your garden over the winter so you can decide if it’s the right choice for your needs.
Reasons Some Gardeners Choose to Use Plastic
Here are some of the main advantages that lead some gardeners to cover beds in plastic for the winter:
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Warms Soil – Black plastic absorbs heat from sunlight and holds it in, which can increase soil temperatures underneath by several degrees. This may help promote earlier spring growth and plant development.
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Controls Weeds – The thick plastic acts as a physical barrier to block sunlight from reaching the soil underneath preventing weed seeds from being able to germinate. This can mean less weeding come springtime.
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Conserves Moisture – The plastic covering minimizes evaporation, which helps keep the soil underneath stay evenly moist. This can be especially helpful in drier climates prone to soil drying out.
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May Deter Some Pests – There is anecdotal evidence that the plastic layer can reduce populations of tunneling insects, nematodes, and other soil-dwelling pests. However, research is limited in this area.
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Possible Frost Protection – The insulating properties of the plastic may protect covered plants from a degree or two of frost damage. However, it is not reliable protection in the case of hard freezes.
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Repurposes Plastic – It can be a way to reuse old plastic tarps, painter’s drop cloths, etc. before throwing them away and sending them to the landfill. The plastic covering helps repurpose materials that might otherwise go to waste.
Reasons to Avoid Covering Beds with Plastic
However, there are also some significant drawbacks to covering your garden with plastic over the winter:
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Promotes Fungal/Bacterial Growth – Wet soil and poor drainage underneath the plastic becomes prone to harmful fungal and bacterial diseases. These problems can linger well into the spring growing season.
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Hurts Soil Health – The anaerobic conditions formed under the plastic sheet inhibit beneficial microbial activity in the soil food web Vital organisms like earthworms often die off over the winter
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Kills Cover Crops – Any existing living mulches like clover or rye cover crops will suffocate and die off when covered by plastic for an extended time.
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Can Harbor Pests – Slugs, snails, rodents, and other pests may take shelter under the plastic and thrive in the warm, moist conditions it creates.
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Looks Unsightly – A large sheet of plastic covering a garden bed is considered an eyesore by many gardeners, and neighbors. It can make the yard look messy and uncared for.
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Blows Away – The plastic becomes brittle when exposed to sun, wind, snow, and ice. It easily tears and the wind can rip it off of beds if not very securely fastened down.
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Creates Plastic Waste – Even biodegradable plastic leaves behind residue and takes many months to break down. Reusing plastic only delays proper disposal in a landfill.
Best Practices for Using Plastic as Winter Cover
If you decide the pros outweigh the cons for your needs, follow these tips to use plastic properly:
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Choose thick UV-stabilized, heavy duty construction grade plastic. Thin plastic will deteriorate quickly.
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Secure the edges extremely well with bricks, garden pins or by burying edges to prevent wind lift.
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Apply plastic in late fall after a few hard frosts, to avoid trapping pests underneath while soil is still warm.
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Remove the plastic in early spring as soon as the soil thaws. Pull it off beds immediately at first signs of growth.
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Fold up and reuse intact plastic sheeting if possible. Properly dispose of any torn sections. Recycle if facilities allow it.
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Replenish soil organic matter like compost after removing the plastic each spring.
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Scout for any lingering pest or disease issues and treat them early before planting.
Alternatives to Plastic for Overwinter Care
For gardeners concerned about the risks of using plastic, here are some effective organic overwintering options:
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Apply 3-6 inches of shredded leaves, straw, or other insulating mulch material instead of plastic.
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Grow cold-hardy cover crops like winter rye or hairy vetch. They prevent weeds and build healthy soil.
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Cover beds with breathable row covers, cold frames, or low tunnels to allow airflow while protecting plants.
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Amend soil with several inches of mature compost in fall to feed beneficial soil microbes over winter.
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Use organic pre-emergent weed control products like corn gluten instead of plastic’s physical weed barrier.
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Employ organic measures like traps, diatomaceous earth or nematodes to control overwintering pests instead of relying on plastic.
Covering the garden with plastic sheeting for winter does offer some potential benefits, but also comes with significant risks. Gardeners must carefully weigh if the rewards outweigh the drawbacks for their needs. Oftentimes organic materials and cold-hardy cover crops can provide better insulation and weed prevention without the pitfalls of plastic. Take time to thoroughly assess your climate, soil health, and gardening goals when deciding if plastic covering over the winter makes sense for your beds. With the right preparation, your garden will stay healthy and be ready for spring planting!
Get rid of dead plants
Most of the “ugly” in the garden now is jutting, broken, black and brown dead plants, looking used and sad. Some gardeners simply till under all of the garden plants. Of course this is a simple fix to the problem, and it does add some organic material to the soil. But there are times that this is not the best idea. First of all, think about any insect problems you have had in your garden this year. Many of these nasty pests breed and stash their eggs in the stems and roots of the very plants they infested.
How about cukes that had white powdery spots on leaves, or beans whose vines yellowed and wilted? Or tomato vines that had yellow spots, black dots, or wilted and died? These are all signs of diseased plants. To simply till them under just about guarantees that you’ll have the problem again next yearand probably worse.
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FREEZE IN FORECAST! Bob and David madly begin picking everything the cold will harm: cukes, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, peppers, corn.What I do is gather any such plants into a pile in the center of the garden and burn them on a safe day, usually when it has snowed. I make sure that every corn stalk, every vine is burned to white ash, even if I have to add some light dry brush for fuel. Let corn ear worm eggs or powdery mildew survive that!
Another time to either compost or burn heavy garden waste is when you live in the dry climates, such as we had in New Mexico. There, I opted to chop and compost my corn stalks because it took years for such heavy material to finally rot away. And un-rotted, it tangled tiller tines and was a possible home for garden insect pests.
Don’t worry that you will waste this material because the ash generated from burning it is a good addition to your garden, being high in potash. In fact, we liberally sprinkle our ash from the wood kitchen range across the garden each year.
Before you till that garden plot the last time in the fall, add as much organic material as you can. I doubt that it is possible to add too much, if the material is right. You don’t want to put a foot of raw manure without bedding onto the garden. If you do, your next year’s garden will appear fantastic, but your crops will be huge plants and vines, and little fruit due to the high nitrogen content of the raw manure.
Instead, use at least partially rotted manure with a decent amount of straw or sawdust bedding mixed with it. This will provide plenty of organic fertilizer, and the straw or sawdust bedding will help tame the excess nitrogen and add extremely valuable compost to improve the tilth of the soil.
Another easily added natural material that will do this is bushels and bushels of leaves. If you don’t have enough leaves of your own, gather bags of them from the curb in your town. I used to have a “leaf route,” which was simply a lot of town folks who loved to have me stop once a week and throw their bags of leaves into my truck to use on the gardens instead of paying to have the trash haulers take them away. It was a simple word-of-mouth thing. In the late summer, I just told a few people on a few streets that I needed more leaves for my garden and would happily pick them up. By the time the first flush of leaves hit the ground, I had a list of 15 people who wanted me to stop regularly. And that doubled as other neighbors saw what was going on. It seemed that even town people were tickled to see their leaves go to a good use.
You can spread a foot of leaves on your garden, then either wait for a good rain to mat them down or water the garden well. When it dries enough to till, run the tiller through them until they are chopped up and buried. Then you can wait a few days and do it again. The leaves rot very quickly, and it’s amazing how many leaves you can work in each fall. (Plus, you have garbage bags enough for your trash all winter.)
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The first unexpected frost paints cuke vines a pretty silver. By afternoon they will be black and droopy, stone dead.With your strawy manure, dump six or eight inches over the garden area and till that in well. You can add another layer, as you did with the leaves, except on the area where you will plant your potatoes next spring. If you get this area too rich in nitrogen, your potatoes will be quite prone to scab, making them unappetizing as well as lower producing.
Want a “different” soil amendment that is also free for the taking? You folks who live in the country can go talk to your local grain elevator (not feed store) manager. Ask him if they haul away screenings. Screenings are grain hulls, bits and pieces of husk, straw, and leaves, as well as broken bits and pieces of grain, left over after corn, oats, and other grains are run through a screen to clean them for market. Sometimes there are even piles of wet or sour grain that has spilled when trucks are unloaded. Tell him that you are looking for this to add to your garden soil. In grain producing areas, truckloads are often available free. Watch out for concentrated weed or other seeds in screenings, as you can easily “seed in” a great patch of weeds. Once in a while you’ll see lots of seeds in screenings. Feed these to your chickens or soak them well in an old trough to sour them, then dump them in your compost pile to rot.
My first homestead was located only two miles from a small town with a large grain elevator. They were thrilled to be able to have their dump trucks haul their “refuse” to my place, just to get rid of it. I had so much that I had to hire a fellow with a small bulldozer to come and work the mountains of rotting grain into the ground of my garden and pasture.
It sure smelled high that fall. But when spring came, it had all rotted and turned my garden from a sandy piece of worthless ground to heaven on earth. I tilled the ground and found it deep and black, crumbling behind my tiller like we’ve all dreamed of. It was so productive that my first year was unbelievable. And when I wanted to fish in the river across the road, I could literally take a stick, poke it into the ground and flip out enough worms to fill a soup can in a couple of minutes. That’s God’s truth.
Likewise, my first garden in Minnesota, back in 1972, was on solid red clay, down eight feet or more. I had to plow with a tractor to get my root crops out of the ground. It was that hard. Now that wouldn’t do. So I borrowed a manure spreader and spent two weeks hauling a mountain of old black cow manure from beside the old barn right out onto the garden. Everyone said I’d “burn” the garden plants right up. But I remembered the results of the grain screenings and figured that anything was better than that red clay.
Turns out that I was right. The next year’s garden was much better, and the carrots could be dug, not plowed up at harvest. But every year, for the next 15, I hauled many loads of strawy manure out there and worked it in. And, of course, the truckloads of bagged leaves. When I left, the soil was black, crumbly, and you could not dig deep enough to get down to red clay without a backhoe.
Should you be in an area where the soil is acid, it’s also a good idea to sprinkle lime over the garden as you work in this material. Acid soil is found where you see wild strawberries, wild blueberries, and moss growing across the ground. Of course, it’s best to take a simple soil test to find out exactly how acid or alkaline your soil is, for most plants like a fairly neutral soil to thrive in.
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Working in a truck load of rotted strawy horse manure into our fall garden. (Bob Clay photo)Traditional Methods for Clearing Land
In the past, most people would go about clearing land by lifting the turf from the soil, double-digging, or tilling it. The first method is labor intensive and involves cutting squares of turf, lifting each piece off, and stacking them somewhere to break down. Unfortunately, that also means that the nutrients that are in that sod are taken off too. Double-digging means digging the soil to around three feet and burying the sod and weeds at the bottom.
Tilling with a cultivator as farmers do, or with a rototiller, is another traditional way to clear land. While it can be quick and effective, it has drawbacks. Weed seeds long buried under the soil surface are brought up where they can grow. The roots of pernicious weeds, like dock and bindweed, can also be chopped up. Each piece has the potential to regrow into a new plant, which could mean a challenging weed problem in the future.
I’ve seen this happen to an allotment garden before. It was a bare field, to begin with, and instead of temporarily sheet mulching it with plastic, as I explain further below, they had it plowed. Though the soil was at first bare, it didn’t stay like that for long. Within weeks, the entire area regrew into a solid mass of dock weed, and the problem was so big that the land was later abandoned.
Another drawback of tilling is that it breaks up the soil structure, which can have repercussions on how moisture-retentive and alive the soil is afterward. That’s because plowing destroys soil health and the fungi network that plants need to grow to their full potential. There’s an entire soil microcosm beneath our feet that most people aren’t aware of!
A little inspiration idea to upgrade your garden bed
FAQ
Should I cover my garden with plastic for the winter?
Covering with a plastic sheet or cardboard can also help to reduce soil erosion in your growing beds as well as holding in more nutrients. A lot of people also cover beds in the late winter as a way of warming up the soil quicker so they can start their planting a little earlier.
What should I cover my garden with in the winter?
You might consider adding a plastic tarp over your old blankets or frost cloth (just make sure to use garden hoops to keep the plastic from coming into direct contact with your plants. You could also use garden cloches, cold frames, or even burlap sacks.
Should I cover my garden with black plastic?
As a general rule, leave the black plastic on for two to three months in summer. During that time, the sun’s radiant energy will cook the plants underneath, raising soil temperatures and potentially killing weed seeds on the surface. Only the hardiest of perennial weeds can survive months under black plastic.
Should I Cover my Garden in plastic for winter?
Pros and Cons As winter weather approaches, gardeners often ponder if covering beds with plastic sheeting over winter is beneficial. Black plastic mulch can warm soils, block weeds and potentially offer some frost protection. However, it also has downsides. Read on to learn whether covering your garden in plastic for winter is right for you.
Why should you use plastic covers in the winter?
Monitoring temperature fluctuations under the plastic is essential, especially with clear covers that trap heat. By using plastic covers correctly, you can significantly enhance your plants’ chances of surviving harsh winter conditions. With a little attention and care, you’ll keep your garden thriving through the cold months!
Should you cover your garden in the winter?
Covering your garden in the winter will suppress early spring weeds, help protect the beneficial microbes and insects living inside the garden from frost, while also preventing erosion from wind and snowmelt.
Can You cover plants with plastic for frost protection?
Yes, you can cover plants with plastic for frost protection, but don’t let it touch the leaves. Use stakes to create space, ensuring air circulation, and remember to vent or remove it during sunny days. What Is the Best Material to Cover Plants From Freezing?
When should I Cover my Garden beds for winter?
When preparing your garden beds for the winter, cover them with a mulch after you remove the remaining plant matter (vegetable beds) and before the first snow. If you’re trying to protect your existing garden plants from a late or early frost, cover plants in the evening when the wind dies down and uncover the next morning as temperatures climb.
Can you put plastic cover on plants during a frosty night?
While plastic can be an option, avoid letting it touch your plants directly, as it can trap moisture on the plant and lead to freeze damage. Instead, use it as an outer layer over more breathable materials. Using plastic covers effectively can be a game changer for your plants during frosty nights.