Are You Sabotaging Your Soil Health? 5 Disadvantages of Landscape Fabric That Might Make You Reconsider

Landscape fabric seems like a great idea. Roll out a sheet, throw some mulch on top, and forget about weeds! But then your plants start looking a little sad. And, wait, are those weeds? On top of my precious weed barrier? Yep. Landscape fabric isn’t all it is cracked up to be and it might actually harm your soil health and plants in the process.

Like many gardeners, I would do just about anything for better weed control. It’s a constant battle and I hate sitting outside when it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity picking weeds out of my pollinator and vegetable gardens. Add in some mosquitoes and I’m done. The weeds can have it.

This is probably what the previous owner of my house felt when they put down landscape fabric in the front garden. I didn’t even know it was there until my second year in the house when I began expanding the garden, getting rid of the grass, and making a pollinator paradise. I was shocked to find it lurking under many layers of old mulch with aggressive weeds growing right through it.

Disadvantages of Landscape Fabric

Landscape fabric seems like it is too good to be true, and that’s because it is. It can cause more problems than it solves and ruin your soil health. Here are my takeaways from my experience with and research of landscape fabric.

1. Lack of Permeability

Landscape fabric is woven or spun from synthetic materials like polyester and polypropylene. It’s advertised as being permeable and letting water through, but it’s far less permeable than your soil needs. All the little holes in the fabric eventually get blocked by soil and mulch particles and make things even worse. Water and air can’t get to roots which reduces the health of plants and eventually kills the lovely microbes and microorganisms that make your soil a nutrient-rich living media. This lack of permeability can also trap water in soggy gardens and lead to fungus problems and rot.

2. Weeds Love It

This one seems counterintuitive. Landscape fabric’s purpose is to be a permanent weed barrier. Pop some mulch on top and let it do its job. It works initially by blocking weeds under the soil from coming up, but sneaky weed seeds blow around all year long, land on the mulch layer and begin to dig in. I found out the hard way that landscape fabric is much harder to weed than plain mulch. Those tough weed roots grow down through the fabric and become impossible to pull out cleanly. Leaving sections of roots behind allows those pesky weeds to continue growing and spreading.

3. Plant Deformation

Another unfortunate realization I had in my first years dealing with old landscape fabric was that it deformed some of my plants. Big, lovely hostas that were planted by the homeowner who installed the fabric, but the barrier severely restricted and bottlenecked their crowns. No doubt the hole that was cut in the fabric was large enough when the hostas were planted, but after a few years they became constricted by the impervious plastic fabric. In addition to physical damage to your plants, the reduced soil health can lead to nutrient deficiencies and plant death.

4. Plastic Pollution

Another really unfortunate aspect of landscape fabric is that it is made from plastics. Even if it feels like a soft textile, it is made from fibers of polypropylene or polyester. These fibers break down into to ugly scraps that poke through your mulch and also into microplastics. For this reason, you should never use it in edible gardens and you should reconsider using it in any other applications. This plastic material can also damage your garden by trapping the heat of the sun and hot summer days, thus cooking all the beneficial organisms in the soil. There is no need to add more plastic pollution to our ecosystem when there are perfectly fine weed barriers like mulch or recycled newspaper.

5. It "Kills" Your Soil

Landscape fabric weed barriers kill the wonderful microbes that are hard at work in your soil. These microbes create a healthy environment for your plants and their destruction can severely harm your garden’s delicate ecosystem. Piling compost, fertilizer, and mulch on top won’t help, either. The weed barrier doesn’t allow any soil amendments or mulch to break down into the native soil to recharge it. The only solution is to pull up landscape fabric and work hard every year to reintroduce organic matter back into the soil.

What to Use Instead

Now that we know there are major disadvantages to landscape fabric, what do we do instead? Luckily, there are alternatives to landscape fabric that can help you prevent weeds while also being kind to your garden and the environment.

• Use newspapers to keep weeds at bay. Take a few sheets of newspaper, lay it on your soil, give it a sprinkle of water to weigh it down, and pile fresh mulch on top. This no-till method will help kill weeds and it breaks down and feeds your soil through the year.
• Ram board is another eco-friendly alternative to landscape fabric. Ram board is a thick paper product often used in home renovations to protect floors. When you’re done with it, it can be reused in the garden. Use it in the same way as the newspapers to prevent weeds from coming up. You can find Ram board on Amazon. Just lay it down and apply a good layer of mulch to keep weeds at bay or kill off areas of grass.
• Even groundcover can be planted to prevent weeds! Plant dense evergreen groundcover to exclude weeds. Creeping juniper, creeping phlox, wild ginger, and foamflower.

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