Now I don’t have anything against carpet itself. We have it at home and it does a really good job on the floors. There are lots of places that carpet works well and belongs. I have even seen it used almost, but not quite, successfully to enhance the interior of a Robin Reliant van.
It just doesn’t belong on allotments.
I have no idea when someone came up with the idea of covering a patch of land to smother weeds. After all, no light, no photosynthesis and, eventually, no weeds. However, some years ago someone on Gardeners’ Question extolled the virtue of carpet as a weed suppressant and it became very popular. Carpet suppliers were even happy to give away remnants of new carpet to allotments rather than it go completely to waste.
The snag was that people didn’t think about what would happen with the carpet when they had finished suppressing weeds with it, or lost interest in allotmenting. I can’t remember whether GQT gave any advice on this bit of the lifecycle of carpets either.
What actually happens is that the carpet stays there. It doesn’t rot down nicely to compost, especially the ones made with man-made fibres. You can’t dig, rotavate or even grow anything useful with them in place either. This means that, eventually, someone has to pull up a wet, heavy, unwieldy, generally unsavory mess and get it to a tip for it go to landfill. If it is the person who laid the ruddy stuff then hopefully they will know better next time. Unfortunately, it is often someone else.
There are also reports that carpet contains dyes, fungicides, insecticides and other chemicals used by the manufacturers to help keep carpets in good condition when in use. These can wash out into the ground.
Like a lot of things, when people get a “good idea”, they really go for it. For example, this is about half the carpet pulled up recently on a plot at Tomswood; it is also the trigger for this article:
Deep Pile Carpet
Over the years we have filled skips with literally tons of the stuff. And skips aren’t cheap these days.
This is why we really, really, really do not want anyone bringing carpet on to either of the sites for use on their plots. It is also specifically prohibited in our leases from Redbridge Council:
3.20.8 Not to use carpet at any allotment plot at the Premises for the purpose of covering or controlling the spread of weeds.
If my memory is faulty and the wonderful Gardeners’ Question Time had nothing to do with the whole carpet on allotments thing, then I apologise for casting nasturtiums on them. GQT is a great source of reliable and practical gardening advice, as well as dodgy humour.
