Remember how I piled up weeds on some fallow beds a few weeks ago?  My hope was that the weeds would rot down into a mulch, killing the weeds on the bed and protecting the bare soil --- a sort of no-till cover crop.

This week I'm due to plant peas in those beds, so I went to poke at them.  The result --- it's a good technique, but needs a bit of tweaking.  The beds which I covered three weeks ago were nearly ready to plant into, but I had to pull a lot of weeds on the sides of the beds, making me think that I should have poured weed mulch there as well as on the bed tops.  I scraped back the mulch with my hands to open up two rows of bare soil, planted my peas, and sprinkled some of the mulch lightly over the soil-covered seeds.

Unfortunately, the weeds which I'd dumped on beds a week and a half ago weren't ready to be planted into yet.  I carefully picked through the weed mulch on one bed to remove any weeds which still showed color.  On another bed, I just gave in and yanked all of the weed mulch off.  I figure in the future, I should plan to leave the weeds at least a month to rot down before I plant.

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

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.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.