Following on from my post about marking up the Onion Weed Membrane I finally bit the bullet last night whilst my good lady wife was getting her Emmerdale, Coronation Street, EastEnders fix, and set up a scaffold board between the sink and the worktop in the kitchen and draped the marked up weed membrane over it and proceeded to heat seal 105 planting holes with the soldering iron.
If you have ever used Mypex weed control membrane then you will know that cutting it is a nightmare as it unravels to produce a mess of strands which get caught in almost anything that goes near it, and after a year on the site you may as well throw it away as I did the first year I used it.
It is possible to buy these sheets already produced in a variety of sizes and with different hole configurations, see the QuickCrop web site, however I prefer to custom produce mine out of sheets cut to my 2.4m x 1.2m bed size using my trusty soldering iron.
So 105 holes later I have my first onion specific sheet ready and waiting which is a good thing as I need to make two of these just for the overwintering onions that are in the greenhouse. I guess it took me about an hour and a quarter to get the tools and set it up and cut, I didn't rush but that time in the dark winter months is going to save me hours of weeding and looking after the onion beds during the growing season.
I have sheets that are now going into their forth year and quite frankly apart from being a little dirty, they do get a brush off before I put them away for winter, they still look as if they have many years of service in front of them.
The added bonus is that I have Brassica Collars to last me a lifetime, as nothing get wasted.
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