If you're looking for expert gardening help or are just new to the hobby, hiring landscapers seems like a sensible option to make sure your plants and trees get the help they need to thrive.
However, after witnessing the work of the team they hired, one person quickly regretted the arboreal assistance.
Posting in the misleadingly named r/marijuanaenthusiasts subreddit — a community for tree lovers — the gardener shared a picture of the landscapers' work and asked if what they had done would actually harm their lemon tree.
"Doing some landscaping and they put this weed barrier fabric around my lemon tree," they captioned the image. "Will this negatively affect it?"
It didn't take long for the community to make their voices heard, with most suggesting this was a bad idea.
"Yes this will negatively affect it," one user said. "I would remove and add a thin layer of mulch."
"Depends if you think water and oxygen are important to trees," another user sarcastically quipped.
A master gardener at an extension provided many resources and wrote, "Over time it eventually suffocates the soil underneath it, rendering it lifeless and anaerobic, especially if you use synthetics."
Indeed, the landscaping fabric will deprive the roots of much-needed water and oxygen, stopping the transfer of nutrients throughout the tree. The roots might even start to grow upward through the fabric in the fight for survival, which could end with their wrapping around the tree in a circular fashion and strangling the trunk — known as girdling.
While landscaping fabric has been marketed as a way to help suppress weeds, it often does more harm than good. If it's made of plastic, it will shed micro- and nano-plastics as it splits from weather and the growth of weeds underneath and above it. This plastic will persist in the environment for decades and can contaminate soil by leaching the harmful petrochemicals used to make the material.
If it's made of a strong fabric, it's likely the roots of plants and weeds will grip the material, making it much more difficult to remove and not solving the problem you set out to fix.
In fact, landscaping fabric is mostly intended to help keep stones from sinking into soil in gravel installations. If you're not using it for that, keeping things natural is the way to go.
This gardener learned a lesson, and we can hope they were able to persuade the landscapers to rip up the fabric before going any further. With the tree providing lemons and helping to reduce weekly shopping bills — as well as providing natural shading and cooling assistance and encouraging biodiversity — they'll want to keep it thriving for years to come.
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