My Roofing Shingles Garden Hack
I have a great garden hack to share that involves repurposing old roofing shingles in your garden.
When I bought my forever garden in 2014, my lawn was entirely grass, and I wanted to make flower beds. The first couple years, I lay down large swaths of deconstructed cardboard boxes to kill off the grass and make garden beds. This is a popular solution and worked great but I learned something rather funny about cardboard: it contains cellulose, which is food for mushrooms. And the mushrooms that grew were “Phallus Impudicus” – the common stinkhorn. Or as I called them “garden penises.”
Some people have fairy rings, but I was completely beset with garden penises for two years. Good times.
Using Roofing Shingles to Expand a Garden
As time passed, I wanted to enlarge an oval bed that I had planted, and that’s when a friend suggested (and donated) roof shingles. Laying roofing shingles all around the perimeter of the garden allowed me to kill off more grass over the winter. Come spring, I lifted them up and planted in the which was now devoid of grass.
What I learned is three-fold:
- Roofing shingles last a long time
- Roofing shingles make really good curved coverage areas
- Nothing whatsoever can grow under them.
Starting point
Roof shingles to enlarge
Nice neat curves
The final garden bed
My Spiral Path
During the pandemic, I was home alone with the cats, a big garden, and not much else. One day, looking down from the second floor, I decided that what my garden needed was a spiral path. Late in the fall, I lay down the path I wanted to see. What was great about this plan was that the shingles could be adapted to any curved line, and easily moved until I was happy with the appearance – from both ground level and looking down from indoors.
I left the shingles in place through the early spring, and nothing grew under them. The grass was brown, dead, and weakened. So when it was time to cut out the sod, the path was defined, and the grass roots were easy to tear out. I spent a weekend cutting and lifting out the sod, and then put down flagstone.
I weed wack around the stones to keep them exposed and it looks as good as I imagined. The roofing shingles – now starting to break down a bit – went back into a pile for my next project.
Roof shingles down all winter
Cutting the dead sod
Cleaning up the path
Laying down stone
All packed in
How it looks now
The Hell Strip Garden
In every city, there are stretches of land between the road and the sidewalk, often referred to as a “hell strip.” The one directly in front of my house was creatively transformed into a garden using old roofing shingles.
There are shingles under the mulch
Filling in with cat mint
The final hell strip garden
A couple years earlier, I had divided a large cat mint that was outgrowing it’s space. I just dug three holes in the hell strip space, right in the grass and weeds that grew there. It was too large a space to dig out by hand so roofing shingles came to the rescue again.
I lay them down on the perimeter of the hell strip, and focused on planting just down the narrow center. A covering of mulch kept it looking neat. You can’t see the shingles under there – and it looked neat and tidy. After a year, all the weeds and grass underneath was dead, making it easy to plant more of the space.
After 5 years and three projects, I was down to a few shingles that hadn’t disintegrated completely. They do tend to tear and fall apart after a while – but when really depends on if they were on a roof for thirty years first!
I highly recommend keeping an eye out for neighbors having roofing done, if you’re a gardener. Divert some shingles from the landfill into your garden shed for future projects, and you won’t regret it.
