Make Your Yard WEED FREE All Season Using Recycled Trash!

What's growing on gardeners? It's Sunday April 7th and it is a gorgeous early spring day here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina. On today's video I am going to show you how to make your yard and landscaping weed-free all season long completely for free and we are going to use recycled material to do this so it will also be very environmentally friendly. If you're new to the channel please subscribe and hit the bell to receive new video notifications and check out our Amazon store and spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom designed apparel and other gear. Your support is greatly appreciated. A little over a month ago I showed you the massive fruit tree expansion that I was adding to my rear property and in that video I showed you all the different bare root fruit trees that I was planting as well as how to plant them, how to fertilize them and I added compost to them as well and I'll make sure to link to that video above and down in the video description if you want to see everything I'm planting this year or have already planted this year. But one thing I did not do in that video is mulch the area and I didn't do that on purpose because I wanted the black soil to show so the Sun would heat up that nice dark black soil and bring the fruit trees to temperature more quickly so they would bud out more quickly. Well now I'm having a few problems as a result. As a consequence of not mulching I am having a lot of weed seed germination now that it is early April and it's getting warm all of the weed seeds are starting to germinate and you can see this area is starting to become cluttered by weeds so I need to do something about that and I want to suppress these weeds so they won't grow at all for the rest of the season. It may be tempting to simply place mulch on the area to try and snuff out the weeds but the way that mulch primarily works to suppress weeds is you place it as a ground cover so the weed seeds that naturally blow around in the wind when they lay on top of the mulch they can never reach the soil level for them to actually germinate. Once there's already weed seeds on top of your soil and they're in the germination process if you cover them by two or three inches of mulch the seeds are just going to germinate and grow right through the mulch. We have to have something to suppress those seeds to snuff them out so they will never germinate in the first place. And to do that I'm going to snuff out all of the weeds by lining the area with cardboard first. Over the last few months I have collected all of the natural brown cardboard boxes that I've received from our various orders online and I've removed all of the tape and I've removed all of the labels from them so what you see is just natural brown cardboard and this makes a great environmentally friendly weed mat instead of just throwing them in the trash. And yes I said throw them in the trash not throw them in the recycling and that's because the overwhelming majority of what we put in our recycle cans actually just winds up in the landfill right next to our trash so this is a real way that you can actually recycle your cardboard. And just look how much cardboard this actually is. If I were to break this down and put them into trash cans this would fill up at least half of my commercial trash can. It's really heavy it probably feels like 25 pounds of cardboard so instead of throwing all of that away and wasting trash bags and wasting the space in my trash can I can use this for a purpose that benefits my fruit trees, saves me money, and is better for the environment overall. It's a win on all fronts. Now I only do this method with natural brown cardboard where I have removed all of the tape and labels. I don't do this with waxy cardboard, colored cardboard, and I certainly don't do it with the labels and the tape left on. So let that be a if you're concerned about which cardboard to use the natural brown stuff is the stuff I recommend. Now the first thing I want to do is I want to take a rake and I want to disturb all of these weeds. I'm only going to rake roughly the top inch or so of the soil. I'm not going to remove all the weeds I just really need to disturb those roots and try to pull most of them out of the ground as best as possible. And in the process we are also going to do our best to level the soil. So now the overwhelming majority of weeds have been uprooted and the ground has been leveled as best as possible. Now we will start to begin placing the cardboard. And placing the cardboard is really up to you. You just want to get the pieces to fit together like puzzle pieces as best as possible. I have all the small pieces of cardboard over there. The larger sheets I'm going to cut with the utility knife. And this is a totally iterative process you just need to fit them in through guess and check as much as you possibly can or as best as you possibly can. Like I said I think the big sheets you should save them for the big areas in between because they are a little bit harder to come by. But the smaller sheets over here you can usually work these around the borders and fit them in the back. So just lock everything into place as best as you can. Don't be afraid to tear things up and just make it work. And now all of the cardboard has been placed as far as I have border bricks. So everything pretty much fit perfectly. Now one thing you will notice is that I left a gap at each tree. And that's because I want to be able to add fertilizer to the trees sometime during the middle of the season. So I never want the cardboard to abut all the way up to the trunk. I always want to leave an area where the root ball is so I can add fertilizer later. So now that all of the cardboard is down let's apply mulch on top of the cardboard to lock it into place. Gardeners ask me all the time what is the best mulch to use in your yard and garden. And the answer to that question is anything natural that you can get locally that is inexpensive and that fits the bill for what you're doing. I really only tell people what not to use. Do not use dyed mulch that you buy in bags at stores because dyed mulch is overwhelmingly up to a hundred percent crushed up pallets and old construction supplies that they then dye to make look like real wood when it is not a natural wood product in many cases. That's why the dyed mulch is actually cheaper than the natural wood mulches that are actually made out of real wood. Don't use rubber mulch because that's often made out of old tires. Don't use stone mulch because it doesn't decompose and add organic matter to your soil. Stone mulch is of really low value and poor quality. I would not use it anywhere where I'm growing trees or shrubs. Now when it comes to what you can use, you can use any kind of natural mulch. You can use hardwood bark mulch, pine bark nuggets, cypress mulch, cedar mulch, triple shredded hardwood bark mulch. You can go rake up leaves around your yard or collect pine straw from the pine trees that drop the needles. You can use old straw, old hay as long as you're sure it's not contaminated or full of weed seeds. You can even mow your lawn and collect the old grass clippings and as long as they aren't full of seed tops you can use that as mulch. What I'm going to use is the wheat straw that I use to protect my bananas throughout the winter because I have it lying around and it is completely free. One of my absolute favorite things to use as mulch is actually old decaying bales of straw because the weed seeds no longer germinate because they've all been killed in the decomposition process and it just interlocks in the place and it is fantastic at weed suppression. So I'm going to take the straw out of here and if you're wondering how well my straw worked at insulating my bananas behind me, well a few of the pseudostems are showing pretty green so I'm hopeful that I will get some type of bananas this year. Now all the straw mulch has been dropped into place. It is weighing down and locking in that cardboard. Now we are going to spread it around evenly into a minimum three inch thick layer. If you want to go a little bit thicker that's okay too. All right all of our straw mulch is placed and I am really happy with the way that this turned out. I just love the way that straw mulch looks around fruit trees. It's very rustic and functional. Now one thing you will notice is that I never pile the mulch up against the tree trunks. I always leave a few inches of separation because rotting mulch can rot tree trunks. Never do that. Never create a quote-unquote mulch volcano. Never pile your mulch up or compost up against a tree trunk. Always provide airflow and separation. Now in my experience if all you do is put down a few inches of a natural mulch it will only last for about two to three months before some weeds start penetrating the mulch. That's because there are going to be some weed seeds that are down in the soil level that will eventually germinate and make its way up through the mulch and also because the mulch will naturally break down, expose more of the soil and more seeds that just blow around in the air will contact the soil and germinate. When you use this combination cardboard and mulch method I found this gives you protection for about an entire year so you get something like three to five times greater life out of your mulch. It is really fantastic and the cardboard has the added benefit of suppressing any weed seeds that germinate along the soil. So all of those weed seeds underneath right now instead of germinating and breaking through the mulch they're going to germinate but they're going to get no light and no air and they're going to suffocate and die underneath the cardboard. The cardboard will eventually break down but that is actually a good thing. The cardboard will dramatically increase the effectiveness of the mulch and you'll have to do a whole lot less work over time because you won't have to mulch as often but because that cardboard eventually does break down it feeds the soil, it feeds the worms, the worms absolutely love wet decaying cardboard and because it is not a permanent solution that means you can keep saving up all your cardboard and recycle it in this way so when this cardboard does eventually give out you can replace it with more cardboard that you've been saving. So it is a great way to continuously recycle your cardboard. And again the best part of this technique is it is free. I spent zero dollars making this video. The cardboard was free. The mulch was free because I bought it to insulate my bananas so its purpose has been served and I'm just repurposing an item that I already had. And again if you don't want to go out and buy mulch you can just use grass clippings, you can use leaves, pine needles, you can check your local county or recycling center. Sometimes they give free load your own mulch or compost so check with them. You may have a free source of mulch and you don't even know it. And again the awesome thing about this is it is a net benefit because not only was it at no cost to me but I'm recycling all of that cardboard that would otherwise be thrown away so it's really beneficial to everybody. And again this technique is going to increase the lifespan of my mulch three to five times and dramatically enhance the weed suppression capabilities. I will have to do little to no weeding in this area all year long. So everybody I sure hope you found this video helpful. If you did please make sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel and please ring that notification bell so you're notified when I release more videos like these. If you're curious about any of the products that I use in real life in my garden I will place links to all of them down in the video description in my Amazon storefront link. So click the Amazon storefront link you'll see everything I use in real life and while you're down there check out my spreadshop for custom merch if you want to support the channel. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video. Dale is being such a good boy relaxing on his couch bed and I hate to do this buddy but I have to fire up your arch nemesis. Oh boy here comes the robot vacuum. It's coming out to play buddy. It's coming out to play. I know it's not your favorite but it does such a good job while your dad's working. It does a really great job. Uh-oh where did Dale go? He's not on his bed anymore. I wonder where Dale could be? And there he is hiding from the robot vacuum. That's okay he's being a good boy. We'll give him a treat a yak milk chew. He loves these. Go ahead buddy. Oh I fell. Let's try that again. Part number two. This chewing always takes the anxiety away.