Looking for a weed barrier to plant long rows of trees

[clemsonfor]

Last year i bought the fabric and used it for my vegtable garden, ran it then poked holes in it to plant, weed free mostly. I used about the midgrad from walmart, lowes is the same i just saved a buck or two and went to walmart. The thing is that it is not supposed to be exposed to sun as this causes more rapid deterioration, so you would need to have it covered in a thin layer of mulch if this is for more than say 2 years. My garden fabric stayed out all year till i started the garden this year exposed, it was still basically intact this spring and i reused some of it that did not tear when i removed it. 2years and it prolly would let weeds through easy if not covered from sun.

Use a trafic cone to cover trees and spray with a glyphasate. The cone goes over the tree and then its sprayed around.

 

[LBrown59]

Ya see the pine trees in the upper right corner of this picture.
There are the six of the 15 or sixteen that survied that i carried up there in my pockets and planted in 1974 when i was working for the Wayne Nation Forest.
One of the Free fring benfits of working there was free tree seedlings.
There was nothing but an empty hay field joining my land at that time .
I couldn't keep up with the keeping weeds from squeezing them out so gave up on that so the weeds took over and crowed all the other ones I'd planted out.
Today three is a 7 house subdivision in that former hay field that was built 20 or 25 years ago
Knowing what I know now I wish these 6 had not survived either.
Notice the buildings behind the pine trees. The buildings are in the subdivision .
Limbs are regulary falling on the subdivision and have to be trimed back away from the buildings.
To hire some one to remove these 6 big trees would be quite expensive.
To think I could have avoided this headache and expense simply by never planting them in the first place.
This is the second time I've found out that free can be one of the most expensive thing you can own.

 

[nmu98]

This probably sounds odd, but I am thinking of burying a wheat straw bale about 1/2 way into the ground and placing the cutting inside the bale. We have pretty heavy ground in this area and I think the spring rains will keep it wet enough to get the tree started.

The wheat should be full of nitrogen and compost well leaving me a weed free area for a few years, maybe.:laughing:

I have read about wheat straw gardens, but never used like this.

Any thoughts?

I can bale our wheat fields now for about $.65 per bale if I do not break anything...

 

[1bush2hog]

I picked up some of the weed block fabric 2'X2' squares from a forestry supply house several years ago and used them when I set out 1000+ seedlings. The squares had an X cut in the middle and used 4 L shaped pins to hold down the corners

These lasted about 3-4 years, and kept the weeds out and allowed moisture thru. They were not too cheap, and did require some additional labor (appx. 1 min per seedling), but I will use them again when I set out more seedlings this winter, as they did a great job of keeping grass and weeds down around the trees. I did occasionally have to pull a few strands of grass or weeds that managed to make it thru the X, but not on many trees at all.