Re: OT- Hi again, just finished garden prep!

I live on the north side of a mountain under mostly oak trees. The soil is non-existent with mostly rock and hard pan clay. When I wanted to plant a lawn, I had to top dress with multiple truckloads of top soil to cover approximately 5000 sq ft of what would eventually be future lawn area. Just as an after thought I put in some beds under the surrounding trees and not having enough money to afford mulch I had a friend of mine who has a tree business deliver a load of wood chips and I put several inches of them in the beds. Now a few years later, I have several inches of top soil in my beds from the mostly decomposed chips. It is really nice stuff (deep black, aerated and not compacted) it is better than the top soil I have in my lawn. I was really amazed by this. It also did a very good job of controlling the weeds in the beds. When I do this again this spring or summer, I am going to try to put the stuff down more heavily to control the weeds hopefully even better.

I have some questions though. Why the cardboard, wouldn't the straw bales have a lot of weed seeds, and wouldn't the pine needles acidify the mixture?