I am glad that Wasilla banned plastic grocery bags several years ago and now only allows paper sacks... but what do you do with all of those paper sacks that you saved? I try to always bring my own reusable cloth shopping bags but I still seem to collect quite a few paper grocery sacks over the year. I really wanted to find some way to reuse them. At least I don’t have as many plastic shopping bags now to dispose of. We do have a recycling center and they will take plastic bags, but most people don’t recycle and the majority of the plastic still ends up in the landfill or worse just blowing around the countryside.
I use a soaker hose for irrigation that seems to work just fine under mulch. After weeding the bed I will lay out my soaker hose. Then I put down a layer of folded paper sacks over the hose and around my plants and cover this with mulch for weed control. After I lay folded sacks I then wet them down to help them to lay flat.
I then cover the folded paper sacks with 6" of mulch and wet this down again to help settle. I have used cardboard in the past under the mulch and that works well too. They both seem to break down in 1 - 2 years. I used the same method around my Broccoli and under my berry bushes and it worked very well.
