Grass growing in thin mulch and fabric liner

Hello folks, new to forum, first question of many, no doubt, hope you can help.

Just rented a house, the whole bottom part of the garden, about 3m by 5m, has that fabric liner stuff over it and an uneven and thin (about inch and half) layer of I think bark mulch. There's nothing else growing there except some saplings for some bushes that are still just that.

Nothing but the grass tufts and another small leafy plant that has propogated all over it last couple months. Landlady has told me that there's no intention for those to be there, so out it must go. I've never had bark mulch/liner stuff in a garden before.

Both grass and weed plant don't seem to have grown through the liner, they seem to be rooted in the mulch, come out pretty easy, though they still do need a bit of tug.

Simple question: best way to go about it (I won't use herbicides cos I might roll a couple metres back and grow some potatoes)? I can get down and hand weed, no worries, but I want to make sure I'm not missing a trick as there's 15 square metres to do and it's going to take hours. Also, I don't know if I'll be doing this every month or something, not keen on that. Would just going through it with traditional dutch hoe be sensible, be OK on that lining? I don't to damage it. Garden rake?

Basically I'm hoping someone will just say "yeah grab your dutch hoe and give it a shove through and just leave it all on the surface to die off", but that may be wishful thinking. I have googled but nobody seems to address this question directly - best way to pull 'em out when in rooted in mulch?

Thanks for help .

 

Hi welcome to the forum .

I would turn the dutch hoe round and use it to scrape the weeds off rather than hoeing them off which risks cutting the liner. Do it on a nice warm / dry day and you don't even have to pick the weeds up ( unless the are large and unsightly ) they be dead within a hour or 2 .

 

I find that when weeds grow on whatever "decorative" stuff is put on top of the weed membrane they come out easily ... provided they haven't been there for too long and got properly rooted-through.

If the membrane has been down for yonks there shouldn't be much weed under it that is still alive (unless it has got sight of daylight at the edges or somewhere), so the soil will be "clean" in that sense.

But no additional goodness will have got to the soil either ...

So you could have all the membrane up, and should have clean soil, or you can leave it in place and clean up the top (with intention of planting through the membrane, which would avoid weeding in future, and would help retain moisture for the plants). I would make a compost heap of all the bark and whatever junk / weeds are growing in it (unless the bark looks pretty new?)

Do the weeds not just pull off? they might come up in a "carpet" if you pull. Tools might snag / tear the membrane (assuming you want to keep it)

What does landlady require you to do with garden / membrane; anything specific?

And what do you want to grow? Potatoes would be easy ... but does that mean you want to grow a range of Veg?

P.S. A Photo might help

 

Thank you for replies.


I don't know that I'll be living here for years or anything, so the main intention is maintaining the garden as I found it, taters notwithstanding. So I guess it's just buy a hoe and see how it goes. The stuff does come up pretty easy, it's just there's a good covering of grass clumps in the bottom half now, I'm just looking for the bare minimum effort method. Perhaps I'll just hand weed it and do 20 mins every day or something, working from home anyway, not going anywhere.

I have no idea what their intention was. Why on Earth have that much mulch down and do nothing with it beats me, might just as well have been more lawn.

I've grown potatoes before, will likely just do that, 6-8 plants over 2 square metres (unless you think I can get more in, dunno, been a few years since I did this), maybe see if I can fit a few lettuces in the gaps. Though dunno what I'll do for seed potatoes yet, with what's going on, not checked it out. Bottom of garden gets more light than in pic, that was quite late in the day, and it's not as narrow as it looks. Is it worth getting some chicken pellet fertiliser in the ground (if I can get some) while turning it over and planting in a week or two, or is it too late for that?

Thanks again for replies.

 

Potatoes will go in off to the bottom left of the picture, gets the most light. Plus off of the lower right of the picture, apparently somewhere there's a dead dog buried