What Comes first, Hardware Cloth or Cardboard?

Tales from Building a Garden Bed

This August will mark the 3rd year in the house. I built a garden bed last year out of scrap wood and planted my first vegetables. I did pretty good and couldn't wait to build more, grow more.

It is very gratifying to build something, even if it is just a simple box with no top or bottom. Using the miter saw, measuring, drilling, screwing the pieces together, and then looking out the window the next day and seeing what you built.

Let's Build a Garden Bed

This garden box isn't very big, at least compare to the others. It is 12 feet x 4 feet and 11inches tall, just enough to get it off the ground, but not too high that I can't reach the harvest. I plan to put pepper plants in this bed this year, and other taller plants in subsequent years, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers.

There are moles, voles, and mice on my property. I have seen them when cutting the grass. To make sure that they aren't burrowing up and eating my plants, I started with hardware cloth, cutting it 1 foot longer than the bed and one foot wider. The roll I have is 4 feet wide, so I have to cut two lengths and join them. Since I had already cut a length for another bed, I had a narrower 13 foot length I could use. The overlap was about 12 inches. You really only need a 6 inch overlap, but hardware cloth is difficult to work with. There is no point in cutting it to exact measurements if it's not absolutely necessary.

Once positioned exactly where i wanted it, with the second piece neatly aligned and overlapped, the two pieces need to be joined. On the first two beds I made, I painstakingly used 6 inch lengths of wire and threaded it through the two layers and twisted them together, every 6 or 8 inches. What a tedious job. The easiest way to manage the hardware cloth is to do the joining when the pieces are on the ground. But that does not make it easy to loop the wire around both layers and making sure the wire goes in one square and out the other. It is not something I care to repeat.

Landscape fabric down and overlapped

Fortunately, I came across a great idea while searching for information about no dig gardening. Landscape fabric staples. Yup, that's what i was going to do. Just crawl along beside the hardware cloth and shove a staple into the ground every 6 inches.

Adding a landscape fabric staple to the Hardware Cloth

Unfortunately, that left me with a burning question, what comes first, the hardware cloth or the cardboard. In all my research, I could find no compelling argument either way. I just didn't think that saying the cardboard comes first to suppress the weeds was a good enough reason to move my neatly laid hardware cloth so I could put down cardboard first. Really, weeds aren't suppressed if the cardboard is on top?

Here is how I saw it. If I put the cardboard down first I would have to use wire to join the two pieces of hardware cloth, then move it so I could lay down the cardboard, and finally put the hardware cloth back on top of the cardboard. No staples, the simplicity would be gone. Nope, I was going to put the cardboard down on top of the hardware cloth, no way was I giving up the staples for little 6 inch pieces of wire. Now, that's a compelling reason for cardboard on top.

Cardboard in the bed on the hardware cloth

When all was said and done, I wasn't sure that hardware cloth was going to be particularly helpful for an 11 inch tall bed. The whole time I was building I kept thinking "What if mice, moles, and voles can climb. Won't that make the hardware cloth useless?" I finally looked it up, after I was done and only mice can climb and its the voles are the most likely to get into the roots of plants, so no, not useless. Just some added protection for all my hard work seed starting, planting and watering.

More about the garden bed build: