Cutting oat cover crops for mulch
One of my long-term goals
is to make our mulching campaign more sustainable. Buying in
straw has really helped build our soil and make my weeding work easier,
but it has 
caused
problems too. First, there's the unique-to-us problem --- we can
only haul in heavy materials a few days a year due to the muddiness of
our driveway, so getting the straw back to our garden during wet times
is difficult. Then there are the more general problems --- price
and the introduction of weed seeds (notably curly dock last year and the grains themselves this year). All of those problems make me wonder if we wouldn't be better off growing the straw ourselves.
As a very basic experiment, I decided to try to mulch a bit more than we usually do with cover crops.
In the past, I've let the tops of cover crops break down on the beds I
planted them into as a way of building soil, but when the oats I planted
on August 1 began to bloom in mid-September, I had Mark cut them with
the weedeater and then Kayla and I gathered the tops to mulch our
strawberries.
It took about six beds of
oats to mulch one bed of strawberries, and even though we spread the
leaves and stems pretty heavily, I'm not sure if that will be enough to
suppress weeds once the oats dry down. I also suspect that the C:N ratio
of the oats will be relatively low at bloom stage (as opposed to
post-fruiting, which is when straw is collected), so this oat mulch
might not last as long as I'm accustomed to. But it's worth a
shot, especially since it's an ultra-easy way to start growing a bit
more of our own mulch. I'll keep you posted as the experimental
bed goes into the winter, and as we try out cutting other cover crops
for mulch.
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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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