Straw mulch
When
Mark
came home with 18 bales of straw, I thought he was being a
little decadent. Who needs 18 bales of straw? Me, clearly.
First, I just mulched
the garlic
beds as I put them
in, but then I decided to go ahead and mulch around everything
else. After a careful weeding job, I put straw around the edges
of any of the cover crops and winter crops which hadn't quite covered
their beds.
My new goal is to have
every bit of the garden either under mulch or cover crop
for the winter. I know from experience that every little bit of
energy you sink into putting the garden to bed in the winter is repaid
threefold by less work in the spring. Autumn
leaves did a pretty
good job last year, but since then I've read that a high
carbon mulch promotes a higher fungal to bacterial ratio than most
garden plants enjoy,
so straw seems to make more sense as a vegetable mulch.
About
halfway through my mulch campaign, the unimaginable happened --- I ran
out of straw. "Mark, I only have four bales left," I said sadly,
and Mark rolled his eyes, refrained from saying "I told you so", and
instead sent me and my father (currently visiting for the weekend) out
to the feed store for one more truckload. I feel even more
decadent now, but I'm looking forward to an even more healthy garden in
2011.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I am on the same page with the mulch and cover crops! We've converted one of our old vegetable gardens into a wildlife garden and I'm planning to start a cover crop in the other. We're also about to start sheet mulching almost a quarter of an acre to start a garden in the coming years. I'm not sure how we'll work it out, but we'll probably have it on rotation, with at least a quarter of it planted in a cover crop through the year.
Since I'm still in school and we've got the toddler, trying to process a lot of produce is a little tricky at times. This way at least I will be building up the soil while we aren't growing, so that when we're ready to manage a much bigger garden, we'll have knocked out much of the prep work.