Paper (or plastic) mulch?

My vegetable beds are very, very badly overgrown with weeds. I mulch the veggie beds, but even so the weeds always get the upper hand by July or so. I am working hard to get a handle on them, but my time is also split with raising the kids and walking the dogs and going to work and all that other stuff too! I am thinking this year that putting down a barrier mat of some sort might be helpful. But I don't know which kind. Any suggestions? Paper? Plastic? And do you really just roll it out, secure it, cut holes, and plant? What should I be looking for when I go to purchase some or to install it?
Thanks!

PURCHASE??? PURCHASE??!?!!??

My stars and little hoppy toads, woman! Or man, as the case may be.

Where's your guerrilla gardening spirit?

No need to PAY for mulch!

Head out to the nearest grocery or big box store (a la WalMart *shudder*) and get a bunch of cardboard boxes. The brown corrugated kind, the glossy consumer packaging kind won't work.

They'll probably already have bundles of them pre-flattened. If not you'll want to flatten them.

Lay these in your path ways, weight them down, pin them down, or cover them up with grass clippings, shredded leaves, or shredded bark (whatever you can get for free, or at least on the cheap). You may put down a layer of newspaper under the cardboard if you want, the only reason to do that is to recycle/reuse rather than throw it away.

Potential sources include your city, from leaf pick up programs; nurseries often sell burst bags of bark mulch for very little and often the bags are virtually full (I paid $1 a bag last year); your own lawn; neighbor's lawns; horse farms often have spoiled hay/straw or used bedding if you have a truck to haul it away in. My brother worked for a local fish farm that had organic effluvia of some sort you could haul away by the truckload for free.

The only thing about horse bedding or spoiled hay/straw is the possibility of weed seeds, but if you MULCH every year they'll never get a root-hold. If you mulch this year but not next that might cause you some problems.

Any of that stuff on top of layers of cardboard will keep the weeds down, regulate soil temp and moisture, and encourage worms and other yay critters to aerate your soil and feed your plants.

Will this work in flower beds too???

YES it will. And cardboard/newspaper acts like an earthworm magnet.....which is great for all plants. But it will decompose over time and you will have to redo it either next year or the one after, depending on how thick you lay it.

That's true, but there's virtually an endless supply of the stuff.

I started mulching my garden with a thick layer of hay one year when the stables out near the community garden sprung a leak and a bunch of hay was spoiled, eg not fit for horsey consumption. SO I had access to all I could carry. I mulched that garden a foot thick, AFTER settling! Best garden I ever had in my entire life, I didn't have to haul water or anything.

But hay/straw is hard to come by in a non-rural setting.

Cardboard, however, is ubiquitous. The only drawback is it can be a little unsightly if left bare-nekkid to the world, also it tends to blow away on dry days if it's the top layer.

Consider it composting in place.

I tend to prefer newspaper over cardboard.....simply because I save the circulars and the local papers in a big stack for creating beds. I will go ahead and plant fall bulbs under the layers of newspapers because by the time a few months goes by, they are able to poke thru the partially decomposed layers of newspapers. Works great ! except when it comes to bermuda grass and that is a wholenother story.