Use cardboard to stop garden weeds

Have extra cardboard boxes from online shopping? Don’t throw them away. You can reuse them in your garden or yard as a low-cost way to stop weeds and enrich your soil.

Using cardboard as a weed barrier — or sheet mulching — is a simple, effective method that suppresses weeds and gradually enriches soil, said Jayla Fry, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service specialist and assistant professor in the Texas A&M Department of Horticultural Sciences.

“This is a very straightforward technique,” Fry said. “It’s simple. Anybody can do it, and it works very, very well.”