We have a large school garden where we grow a good supply of watermelons and cantaloupe for use in the school lunch program.   Controlling weeds and mud between rows of plastic is quite a challenge.  We have tried herbicides, straw, and cover crops with limited success.  We eventually arrived at the conclusion that synthetic, muli-year use landscape fabric offered the best solution for controlling both weeds and keeping students shoes clean so they won`t track mud back to the classroom. 

 The fabric comes in rolls wide enough to cover the row middles.  The 250 Vocational Agriculture students install the fabric by rolling it our and putting landscape fabric pins in the edges of the fabric.  We struggled with removing and storing the fabric for use the following year.  The students removed the pins and rolled and folded the fabric in large fluffy bundles that were hard to handle and store.  We were also faced with the difficulty of knowing how long each bundle was and that created problems when reusing the fabric the following year. 

 We designed and constructed an apparatus using 2 " PVC pipe for a spool with a long rod and a crank to turn the pipe and rolled the fabric up on the pipe in a neat roll easy to handle and store.  We can also label each roll as to the length or lengths of the fabric rolled up on it.  This helps a lot with handling and storage, but it will also make it much easier to transport the fabric to the garden the following year and installation will be just as easy as it would be for a roll of new fabric.  Using this apparatus will help us to get many years of use out of the fabric.  We can amortize the cost of the fabric over several seasons and that make it an affordable option to effectively control weeds between the rows of plastic and also keeps the students` shoes free of mud so they don`t track it back to the classroom.  The fruit harvested is also much cleaner and there are no weeds going to seed and creating a weed seed bank .