Covering My Garden in Cardboard: A Lazy Gardening Hack

The first time I came to see this house, I couldn’t help but be thrilled by the big fenced in garden. We’ve been growing food in containers for the past few years so the thought of finally getting my vegetables into the ground was exciting. I couldn’t wait to have my first “real” garden.

The dream did not match the reality.

It was apparent that the garden had been long neglected and by the time we finally moved in, it was full of weeds. Some were taller than me!

My kids and I spent just about a week cutting, pulling and digging what we could out. We were still left with a decent amount of overgrowth and weeds that were trying to come back with vengeance! 

I spent a few hours Googling. Most of the recommendations were about mulch and covering the soil. The problem is that good mulch costs money and even using cut grass from the mower sounded exhausting. I couldn’t imagine going outside and raking the cut grass up from our 1 acre yard! 

Then the thought came to me. If covering the soil is the goal then I could use another biodegradable material to cover the soil. We had just moved so there was one material that we had an abundance of… 

Cardboard boxes!

Cardboard boxes are a great solution for weeding the garden if you don’t want to spend an exorbitant amount of time or money sitting and weeding your garden yourself.  They’re compostable so they will eventually break down and be absorbed into your soil. You simply cut them up and place them onto the areas where you are trying to rid yourself of weeds.

This works because the boxes deny the plants underneath sunlight and oxygen. I lined the pathways in our garden and with the amount of walking we do on them, in just a few days the ground underneath was almost completely clear! 

The biggest draw for me to this method was that it was free. You can purchase boxes cheaply from any hardware store or maybe it’s time to clear that pile of Amazon boxes you are holding onto. 

It also had an added bonus of soaking up extra water that sat in the garden from a slew of rainstorms that we were hit with shortly after planting our vegetables. 

While it may not be as beautiful as some of the gardens out there, it didn’t cost me a dime and it has saved me a whole lot of time!

Do you have a crazy gardening hack? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!