RickCorey said:I don't know how people manage perennial beds. Mine immediately go to weeds and the soil reverts to clay.
I've seldom added ENOUGH compost and mulch every year to keep a bed happy without deep turning every few years, but I have an ambition to try that after I retire.
In my rose beds, I add something like two inches of mulch derived - at least in part - from well rotted horse manure each year. Smells like there's some pine or cedar bark in the mix. Six years ago there were no earthworms to be found. Now it's a rare shovel full of soil that doesn't have at least one. Sometimes the earthworms can do much of the heavy lifting in soil aeration, IME. Of course, gophers like rose roots and they aerate soil, too.
If I had to turn the soil by hand I'd give up and pave the area over with asphalt. Or grow weeds.
I, too, have occasionally used cardboard held down by landscape staples or small rocks. This I cover with mulch. In a few years it decomposes, and by then the weeds seem disinclined to return. It seems like a pretty good way to get ahead of the weed problem. I also plant daylilies beneath my roses (not that they always bloom nicely there), the layers of shade and the root competition do help prevent weeds. I would say that between all these measures the amount of weeding required is probably not 5% what it was when I just used light, occasional mulching in my rose beds.
But I do not garden on heavy clay; and the ground here stays relatively cool so it does not burn organics so fast as it does many warmer places.
