One of the biggest issues I have with my home gardening and landscape is that I hate to mow, hate to weed, and living in the climate I live in, those are huge tasks that I’m always looking to reduce. In fact my personal objective for any gardening season is to continually craft my yard to be lower effort with each passing year. One of the obvious objectives is to eliminate grass and weeds where I don’t want them so I’m not wasting more time in the heat of summer trying to remove them. Enter weed fabric, which is effective. On the downside, weed fabric costs money and I don’t like that I can’t just tear it up without a giant hassle when I want to make a change or explore something underneath. So given that I have kind of a banana forest going on in my backyard I opted to take green banana leaves that looked like they could be safely pruned, and laid them down under my banana trees, then buried them in cheap mulch. This let my banana’s leaves act as their own weed fabric and moisture retainer.
That worked so well that winter rolled around and a hard freeze decimated the banana leaves, which is expected in winter. So I did the same thing, taking the brown, dead, and uglier banana leaves and layering them under more mulch. That accomplished pruning of unsightly leaves in the non growing season and allowed me to keep expanding my weed barrier with natural and free weed fabric made from banana leaves!
If you’re wondering how I started on this however, it is because bananas have this neat job in my landscape. I’m living in a hurricane zone and I need plants that largely adapt and grow back from the base each season. So they rank high in my landscape wants. But since I enjoy composting most plant waste, I’ve always struggled with banana leaves because they’re so full of fiber that they never want to break down like the rest of the materials I toss in the ground. Which makes them perfect for this task.
