Matting and mulch - will this work?

The Sweeper

Guys, need help from someone who's either tried this and gotten away with it, or tried it and failed!!

I need to create some garden beds - digging by hand just isn't going to happen, because it's too much work. We're talking nearly 80m2 here, a 2m bed along the length of my fence line. The finished aim is to have a planted bed, weed matted and bark mulched over the weed matting with about 5cm deep of pine bark mulch. Currently the area is feral - broad-leaf weeds and running grasses in heavy clay soil, but I keep it cut to five inches or less so it's not the metre-high paddock it used to be.

It's not an option to hire either a bobcat or a bloke with a bobcat to clear a two-metre width of this growth to create the bed, and it will take me the rest of my natural life with my clay soil if I try to do this by hand.

I've taken a risk in the front garden, with a bed that's 10m x 2m deep, very scrubby soil with lots of weeds, but with five trees planted in it. I cut the grass and weeds right back to nothing, then I round-up sprayed the edges of the bed (not the centres near the trees). Then I fixed a weed mat - a good, heavy-duty mat, fixed with wire pegs (which to be brutally honest I was too tight to buy in the shop, so I took a couple of wire coathangers and a tin snips and voila: weed mat pegs). The weed mat overlaps by about 10 inches so there really are no gaps.

Over that, I've just finished spreading 5-6cm of pine bark mulch.

Question is, looks good now, but is it going to work? Is the grass and weeds that I cut back to zilch, that's now buried under all that black weed matting and that pine bark mulch, is that going to somehow rally like some japanese radioactive manga monster and come ripping up through the mulch and weed mat?

If it works out the front, I think it's how I'm going to do the beds at the back. I'm happy to use round-up as a spray on edges to control weeds, but I do the rest of my garden weeding by hand, I don't use insecticides (other than white oil spray to treat specific infestations) and I plant a range of hardy plants rather than have a garden full of chemicals, but digging those rear garden beds by hand - well, it's never going to happen. I'm just hoping this 'shortcut' works.

What do you think? Have I just wasted my time? Any horror / success stories?

Lasereye

Casarone G is you solution, its a weedkiller that lasts 6-8 months per app, it can be put down very easy, and will NOT kill shurbs, very safe, no mask needed and safe with kids and pets too, we use it in our local tidy towns, very good product

bbam

Hi..
To be honest I don't think that putting bark mulch down onto weed matting is a bad idea.. I've seen this done and in about 2-3 year the mulch will break down into a nice compost which will grow as many weeds as you are keeping down..
I've found in the past that without the matting and use a deper mulch of bark will suppress all but the strongest weeds...It will be easier kept weeded at least.
You need to clear the ground first of course..

From the perspective of using roundup you need to understand that it is adsorped through the green portion of the plant and is neutralised when it hits the soil. I'd spray the grass first, leave it 2 weeks and then clear it down to the soil after it is killed.

flutered

bark mulch has been known break down into an acidic mess.