Weeds No More!

 Weeds No More!

It's Chinese New Year in Taiwan at the moment.  This means plenty of food, firecrackers all night long, and the traffic in Taipei halved as droves of cars head down south to visit their family.  A large percentage of Taipei is made up of people looking for jobs in the big city that actually come from towns further south.
Chinese New Year also marks the beginning of Spring on the lunar calendar.  The weather is slowly warming up a touch and the cherry blossoms are blooming as we speak.  Since I have 9 days holiday we have decided to bite the bullet and attempt to kill these weeds!

Out of control weeds sucking up the nutrients of our juniper trees.  It is difficult to see the trees.

Steeling myself for the work ahead.

My girlfriend ordered some weed kill non woven fabric made from some suppliers at her work.  You can order a range of this fabric, the best being organic and made from wood fibers.  The fabric will eventually break down in the soil and act as a natural fertilizer.  The other great things are after you lay it down on the soil you never have to use pesticides, and the water will be able to drain freely along with any fertilizers you add.  The problem with this fabric is that it is very expensive!

  

The non woven fabric we ordered is made out of polyester but contains no chemicals.  Farmers throughout Taiwan love this fabric as it stops weeds growing and keeps roots warmer, resulting in faster growth.  Today we attempted to use this fabric.

The first step was to take the trees out of the soil.  It is still cold here in Taiwan so we hope the roots will not be damaged in any way.  Of course we should have laid this fabric down months ago when we first planted these trees.  We are taking a slight risk but since we are not cutting the roots we should be ok...

                                       Carefully taking these trees out of the soil

   Those white roots are what you hope to see.  They are the new growth and those guys are responsible for sucking up the water and nutrients to the foliage.  When root pruning we want to keep many of these roots but cut away the older ones.  More on that later.

After taking the trees out we chopped up the grass and weeds and then laid the fabric down over everything.  We hope to use the dead weeds as fertilizer for the trees. 

We asked the company that made the fabric to cut holes for us.  The plan was to replant the trees in these holes.  We soon realized that too many holes had been cut which means that some weeds will grow up through some of these holes since light be be doing its job..  Next time we will order less holes.  

It was a bit fiddly but after a few hours we managed.

Almost finished.

The last thing we had to do was use thick wire to hold down the fabric so it doesn't land on someone's roof.

Spring has arrived so let the growing begin.  And I say that satisfied that the growing will be the trees and not the weeds.  A day well spent.