One of our goals for 2010 was constant mulch cover in the vegetable garden.  We didn't get there, mostly because I got so caught up in weeding in the middle of the summer that I forgot I could have been spending half that time mulching and getting the same results.  But we did try out a lot of different mulching materials, discovering in the process which ones work well for our garden.

The easiest and best-suited mulch (in terms of C:N ratio and water infiltration) for the vegetable garden is straw, but straw costs an arm and a leg in our non-grain-growing region.  I have high hopes that we will eventually be growing our own straw as part of our grain experiments, but in the meantime, I wanted to see which free mulches would work in its place.

Cardboard showed a lot of promise early in the season, but ended up keeping the soil too dry.  In the early summer, soil was wetter under the cardboard mulch than in unmulched areas, but I suspect that was due to the cardboard preventing evaporation of water that was already in the soil.  Even though I punched holes in the cardboard to promote infiltration of rainwater, the cardboard-mulched beds started drying out by mid-summer.  In the fall, it was clear that the cardboard-mulched beds were bone dry, and even our dry-soil-loving peppers started to wilt near the end of the year.  Cardboard seems to be more useful as part of sheet mulches to delete weeds from new garden areas or from around woody perennials, and I don't think I'll be using it in the vegetable garden again.

Paper was even less promising.  If we subscribed to the newspaper, we probably would have had better luck, but the junk mail I mulched with had too high of a percentage of colored dyes and glossiness, and the plants around the paper mulch mostly died.  I'd be curious to see if running the paper through a shredder first would make it a slightly better mulch by adding fluffiness and air pockets, but we'll probably use up our junk mail in the worm bin and perhaps with mushrooms in the future.

We used tree leaves as a winter mulch on most of the garden last year, but they were a bit too high in carbon to be optimal for the vegetable garden.  This winter, we're using tree leaves as bedding in the chicken coop, where they mix with manure and (I hope) will turn into a perfect mulch by spring.

Green leaves --- like grass clippings, elderberry leaves, and comfrey leaves --- are well suited to being used directly on the vegetable garden as mulch, but each has flaws as well.  Elderberry and comfrey leaves work great, but it feels like the juice isn't worth the squeeze unless I can find a quicker way of harvesting them, and grass clippings are really only suitable in the spring before the plants start to go to seed.  I think that this year, I'm only going to have Mark bag grass clippings for the first month or two, then let the grass grow up in out of the way parts of the yard in late summer to use as hay for the chickens.

The final mulch possibility is wood chips.  Well aged wood chips make the best mulch for our woody plants, full of beneficial fungi and other soil microorganisms.  I suspect that wood chip mulch that has been well worked over by the chickens and looks like it's halfway on its path to becoming stump dirt would also make a perfect mulch for the vegetable garden since chicken manure would keep this mulch from locking up nitrogen in the soil.  Unfortunately, I rarely have enough really good (aka homemade) wood chip mulch for the trees and berries, let alone for the vegetable garden.

In 2011, we'll probably continue to buy quite a bit of straw for the garden, but we'll supplement it in the spring with grass clippings and with the deep bedding from the chicken coop.  In the long run, someday I'd like to be making enough compost (from cafeteria food scraps?) and wood chip mulch to keep the garden happy with entirely homemade mulches.

This post is part of our 2010 experiments lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: 2010 experiments Experiments in natural beekeeping Chicken incubation, broiler, and pasture experiments Worm bin failures Home-scale edible mushroom experiments Backyard grain experiments Vegetable garden mulch experiments No-till cover crop experiments 2010 garden experiments Forest garden experiments

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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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