Hi @Fire could do yes… I wasn’t sure if that works to suppress stubborn we’d like this. Also we have dry clay and I wondered if wood chip might make it drier still?
You could try landscape fabric under mulch if time and funds allows. We had a massive creeping blackberry problem in a new house we bought few years ago. Fabric definitely helped to reduce plant invasion. Water still goes trough just fine, but anything under fabric just died of sun starvation. Chemicals of any sort weren't an option since we are adjacent to wild life area and water source.
That said, this method only works if you are happy with garden as is and not planning any new plants and underplanting, annuals, etc.. You can remove patches of fabric, of course, but that would defeat the point of putting it in a first place It needs to be tight and as solid as possible. All places where different patches connect should be generously overlapped so nothing slips through the "cracks" in defense.
It usually goes really well with roses, rhododendrons, peonies and any other shrubby stuff. But again, it just means that once fabric is down in your garden (or at least a portion of it) is set as is for a long time.
One more thing we noticed, in few years you may need to check your topping for the fabric. Eventually our mulch got soft enough for weeds to start seeding in it haha (it rains a lot where we live). But those were easy to remove. Just came out as a clump of woodchips with weed in it. We just put a new layer or mulch and it works again.
Unfortunately our neighbour has an area of brambles about 20 feet square! All he ever does is cut it back to give himself a path down so he can maintain the hedge at the end of the garden.
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That said, this method only works if you are happy with garden as is and not planning any new plants and underplanting, annuals, etc.. You can remove patches of fabric, of course, but that would defeat the point of putting it in a first place
It usually goes really well with roses, rhododendrons, peonies and any other shrubby stuff. But again, it just means that once fabric is down in your garden (or at least a portion of it) is set as is for a long time.
One more thing we noticed, in few years you may need to check your topping for the fabric. Eventually our mulch got soft enough for weeds to start seeding in it haha (it rains a lot where we live). But those were easy to remove. Just came out as a clump of woodchips with weed in it. We just put a new layer or mulch and it works again.
Hope this helps!