T wrote:
...
Also, mulch on top of fabric beaks down in a few years
and become the ideal medium for weeds.
at that point it becomes a garden amendment material
and is replaced by new wood chips.
but for your application it won't work.
I just found out that any perennials under the cover
will poke through too. I am sensing that covering
is a bad idea.
not if they're dead. if you do it right (a few layers
of overlapping cardboard and a thick layer of wood chips
on top will smother most perennials within a year, by
the next year any that still have any energy left in
their root systems you pull back the wood chips, cut off
what is growing and repeat the process, i've not had any
perennial weeds that survive into the third year if kept
cut off and smothered for those first two years. we've
also put the cardboard layers under weed barrier fabric
and that also helps defeat persistent perennial weeds.
The goal is to control blowing dust.
upwind wind breaks, large rocks, walls, substantial
fencing, direct 100+ winds aren't going to be deterred
by anything minor. even a very sturdy tree is going
to have a hard time standing up to that.
basically at that point the overall siting of the
place would be critical and i'd not want it put out
in the open and otherwise be in the lee of a hill or
some other natural features.
with fire risk trying to grow trees as a windbreak
only works if the they are able to be planted quite a
ways upwind.
improperly designed wind breaks can act as a channel
and in the case of fires that would be like a potential
blow torch, so that's far outside my experience.
for 100+ MPH dust storms you're not going to control
that, you just have to build to survive that
structurally and if you do put up wind breaks you
probably need to think in terms of how they would
respond to such large events. sand blown with that
much force is going to scour pretty much anything
growing - it'd have to be very tough to survive
that...
songbird
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