Try Black Plastic

“Black plastic has freed me from hours of weeding. I never used to finish that chore,” explains a Massachusetts gardener. “I resisted black plastic because it looks so awful, but we put dirt along the edges and scatter some on top, and that helps. We use three‑ Foot-wide rolls in our entire vegetable garden. We plant a row, lay the plastic, anchor the edges with dirt, plant another row, and so on. The weeding always had hung over me. Now I just hand-weed in the row itself, and we have more time to canoe or play tennis.”

Do your muskmelons sometimes taste like squash? For increased sweetness, plant through black plastic. It will heat up the soil several degrees, and that often makes the difference between tasteless and first-rate melons.

“I can’t bear to put holes in my beautiful 6-mil black plastic,” says one lazy gardener. In April, she rototills, fertilizes, and digs organic matter into the plot where she plans to plant heat-loving crops. She lays large sheets of 6-mil black plastic over the soil and leaves them to kill weeds and heat soil until planting time in late May or early June. She lifts the plastic and carefully stores it, whole instead of holey, until next year; then she plants melons, cucumbers, and other heat-loving crops in warm, weedless soil, and lays “cheap black plastic” ( 1.5 mil) around them for continuing easy maintenance.

Warning: If you have snakes in your area, they may find the black plastic and crawl under it. They love the extra heat there.

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