Why I use cardboard in my square foot and raised bed gardens.

The first raised beds I installed, I scraped the site, put my box down, filled it up, and planted my garden. To my dismay I had a profusion of weeds come up from the soil below my beds.  What to do…What to do?  The next growing season I took some heavy cardboard boxes (plain, not painted of covered with the plastic coating that many come with nowadays). I dug out my beds, picked the frame up,  laid the cardboard boxes down and laid the frame down on top of the card board boxes, and filled my boxes up again.  Walla! No more weeds (except what the birds or winds blew in which were much easier to manage).  Using card board provided a barrier for the weeds reaching the sun and in two growing seasons the cardboard had biodegraded.