Summer mulch experiment
My winter
leaf mulches were a
wonderful success. They kept the weeds down admirably, and seem
to have improved the soil quality in the process. While transplanting
broccoli last week, I was stunned by the moist, crumby structure of
the soil in the loamy upper garden, and by the ubiquity of worms and
other good soil critters.
Unfortunately, I can't
just keep the leaves in place for the summer. Some of the mulch
has blown away or rotted into the ground, while the big leaves left
behind are prone to move onto small seedlings and drown them out.
I raked a few dozen beds bare in March to plant peas and greens, and
now weeds are already starting to crowd my vegetables. Time to
experiment with some summer mulches:
Grass
clippings. Last year, I learned that grass/clover
clippings make a great summer
mulch since they are high in nitrogen and feed the soil while drowning
out weeds. We did make a mistake and mulched two beds with
clippings
that had already gone to seed, with predictable results, but all of the
other beds mulched with grass clippings are happy and healthy.
The
downside of grass clippings is that they decompose very quickly and
need to be refreshed within a month. Since we get about 32 beds
worth
of clippings per month, I figure we have nearly 200 other garden beds
that will soon be in need of mulch.
Newspapers.
My father has had good luck with wetting down newspaper and using it as
a weed barrier around his plants once they're large seedlings. We
don't subscribe to the newspaper, but we do get some catalogs made of
newsprint. I soaked the catalogs and ripped them into segments
about ten pages thick.
Cardboard and
junk mail. Last year, I put a lot of cardboard and junk
mail in our summer worm
bin, but the worms just didn't have the gumption to eat it once the
paper and cardboard matted down into damp layers. I teased the
layers apart and am using the wet cardboard as a mulch.
- Tree leaves. I figure that tree leaves will work as a mulch around more established plants, like our peas that are already several inches high.
I'm trying all four
mulches around our peas in the back garden, and will report back in a
month or so once I can tell how they're doing. I'm a bit
concerned that the newspaper and cardboard will dry up and blow around
since I didn't put anything on top of it, but it's worth a shot!
Anything that reduces our garden's weed pressure makes me a happy
camper.
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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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