Removing landscape fabric

[Attono]

Just bought a little over 7 acres and the previous owners used much of it for growing flowers. Problem for me is that they put down plastic and a black woven canvas-like ground cover to keep weeds down and I suppose they just planted through it. Now it's mostly gotten growth over the top, but the earth underneath is very mushy. I suppose because it is unable to evaporate.

In any event, I'm wondering what the right implement might be to get this stuff up. I've thought about a box blade with scarifiers ir a landscape rake, but thought I'd see if anybody has better ideas.

 

[boomer1025]

Landscape rake might work the best, would be a lot of plastic to pick up. Maybe run a disc over it then the rake.

 

[ncnurseryman]

that stuff is a nightmare and i rarely ever use it. Be sure to kill off all of the weeds as their roots just get intwined into everything. A rake would work or even a cultivator, just something with some teeth to rip it out. Irregardless, you'll have to pick up some by hand.

 

[cttractor]

Yeah, this stuff really is a royal pain. I pulled up some last summer that had been used to keep the weeds down around the bushes in front of my house. It took several hours, and as one poster just mentioned, you'll have to pick some of it up by hand.

So if that's the case anyway, grab what you can by machine first and you'll minimize the manual work. If it's deep (say, 4 - 8 inches), even a backhoe might help getting it up. But if it's shallow, a landscape rake should make short work of it.

Good luck!

 

[GGB]

When we bought our place, the previous owner had used landscape fabric under the 20+ large dump truck loads of sand (nearly 300 yards IIRC) to build a beach for one of the ponds. Unfortunately, it wasn't designed very well-the sand was not spread evenly and there was too much slope. Fabric was showing everywhere and just looked terrible.

I tried to fix it but gave up after two years and decided to rip out the fabric with my loader and rear blade on my JD 2210. Just not enough tractor to move that much sand at the bottom of the beach. So I ended up bringing the skid loader from the farm to finish the job and it still took a lot of work and time.

A whole lot easier to put down than to take up. I hope I never have to do that again.

 

[Attono]

Thanks all. This stuff is sitting right at the surface so I shluld be able to get a lot of it without having to bust my back getting it all by hand. Appreciate the replies!

 

[forgeblast]

I found some cutting the grass one day, wrapped me up pretty good around the blade.
And the tiller found some when putting in a new planting bed, so I would say dont use a tiller or your mower to get it out of there