Reusing Landscape Fabric

Question

Last year I replaced the black landscape fabric in the garden where I plant my tomatoes. The tomatoes seem to do a lot better with the black fabric. Last year we had a really damp and cool spell in the summer and my tomatoes developed some type of blight or wilt; I couldn’t determine which it was. I cut all the infected leaves off and removed all the infected tomatoes and sprayed with a fungicide called Daconil. It seemed to help for a while but it came back and the tomatoes didn’t do very well at all. My question is whether I can reuse the landscape fabric. I plan on moving my tomatoes to another spot in the garden, but I just bought the new fabric last year and would really like to reuse it.

Answer 1

You can reuse it, but you will need to sterilize it. With landscape fabric, this can be done by soaking it in boiling water a few times or in bleach water (though bleach water will damage the fabric some) to kill the bacteria.