Evergreen Organic Garden Mulches

Every garden needs a little mulch. Mulch is a thick blanket of material laid on the ground near plants or in the walkways. It blocks sunlight, keeps weeds from growing, holds moisture in the soil, and keeps the soil temperature steady and cool. Mulch is a must for many dry-country gardeners who are trying to cut down on their watering, and for folks who haven’t got the time to stir up the soil every week to stop weeds from getting started.

People use all kinds of organic matter and material for mulch—grass clippings, bark chips, peat moss, pine needles, leaves, sawdust, black plastic, and so on.

If you have a little extra space you can even grow some mulch. I’ve had good luck with planting winter wheat or winter rye in the fall and letting it grow 3 or 4 feet tall the next spring. Then I scythe the crop before it produces seed and use the plants as mulch around tomatoes, peppers, and other crops. They help feed the soil when I work everything back into the soil after the season.

My favorite mulch is a living mulch of wide row vegetables. I grow most of my vegetables close together so that as they grow their leaves form a canopy over the soil. This canopy blocks out the sun from tiny weeds trying to grow, and conserves water.

Mulches you can eat

An edible mulch keeps weeds down, shades the soil to hold water in, and also provides a harvest of food.

Take my rows of broccoli, for example. The plants are small when I set them out in spring. As they get bigger I put in lettuce plants or some other green throughout the row to grow as an edible mulch. The lettuce grows quickly and helps cover the soil to keep it cool—and broccoli loves cool soil. Because lettuce is a shallow-rooted vegetable, it doesn’t compete with the broccoli for food.

My favorite mulch is a Living mulch

Lettuce also works well under my pole bean tepees and near eggplants as an edible mulch.

Spinach and chard are good edible mulches because they can take a little shade and have shallow root systems.

Hay for Mulch—take care

Many mulches have weed seeds tucked into them and hay is probably the worst. If you mulch with hay, chances are good you’ll add many more weeds to your garden. Most hay is a mix of different grasses such as timothy, orchard grass, June grass and others. By the time the first cutting of hay takes place each year, many of the grasses have gone to seed. These seeds are cut down and baled with the hay. I used some bales of early hay for mulch 10 years ago in the back section of my garden. After all these years, more weeds try to come up there than in any other part of the garden!

Avoid a first cut of hay for mulch. It’s better to scout around later in the season, when farmers are putting up bales of second cut or third cut hay. These will have fewer weed seeds because meadow grasses usually produce seeds early.

The ideal hay mulch is a late cutting from an alfalfa field. Alfalfa is one of the most common hay crops and it’s very high in protein. When you turn alfalfa hay into the soil at the end of the season, you’re giving your soil life a good meal.

Once you find later cuts of hay, it’s usually too late in the season to use them in your garden. I buy broken bales of late cut hay out in the fields at a low price, haul them home, and keep them under cover until I need them the next season.

Some people think straw mulch is free of seeds, but it isn’t. Straw is what’s left of grain plants like oats or wheat after the seed is taken off. But in removing the seeds, some get mixed with the leftover straw. Oat straw always has many seeds which are as much trouble as any weed.

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