Plunge, anyone?

I wonder if anyone can help me with what is commonly known as â??plungeâ?? planting. Have you tried it and what kind of results have you had? I just thought that since Iâ??m going to lay a membrane over my front garden for next year, and cover it with small chippings, putting in potted plants may make placing and removing unsuccessful plants a whole lot easier. Yes, believe it or not, my success rate with plants is not that brilliant. I also want to use this method to keep the weeds down as much as I can.

 

Well, I haven't plunged any plants in pots but I've used a fair bit of membrane in my time and I've found it useful but not the complete answer to suppressing weeds.

The membrane will stop your chips or stones sinking into the soil but some weeds will get through it. They then seem more difficult to get out completely. And good old bindweed will wriggle under the membrane for some distance and then pop up to remind you it hasn't been beaten. Unless you use a lot of pegs, the corners of the membrane will somehow or other creep up to the surface and look scruffy.

So, it's useful stuff but it has limitations.

 

Thank you, Flinty and Marley Farley for your replies and suggestions. Fortunately, There is no bindweed in either of my gardens, So I guess I'm lucky. I'm prepared to tackle individual weeds if they do come through the membrane, since I intend to use Roundup on them. My problems usually come in the shape of wavy bittercress and some creeping buttercup. They both seem to spring up almost everywhere and they're fast becoming a nuisance. Once I set my front garden out, hopefully the plunged pots will make changing plants a little easier for me. A bed of gravel over 12 inches deep may just be a little overly expensive, since I have an area of approx, three metres by about ten metres to cope with.

Do you think that by putting old carpet on the soil first could help suppress the weeds? But there again, I suspect that even carpet with rot away eventually...

 

Interesting idea.
I have used pots to fill gaps in a herbaceous border left by early flowerers like poppies.
You need an area out of sight to bring on all the pots and to return them to when finished.
You will also need quite large pots or a very regular system of watering

''Unless you use a lot of pegs, the corners of the membrane will somehow or other creep up to the surface and look scruffy.''
The trick here is to make a slit trench around the edge of the plot then push the membrane in with a spade, anchors it well, tigtens it and no flapping corners

 

Thanks for your suggestion re the membrane. The person who got me to thinking about plunge planting, is a gardener who works in a conservatory. I kind of liked the idea that you could have a garden full of quality plants, and this would enable me to eliminate any that were past their best and replace them with something that was already established. Being retired, time for watering is not a problem for me.