Smother the Weeds — with Mulch continue…

Get a head start on newspaper mulch in winter. As you finish reading today’s paper, staple it to yesterday’s. Make strips of newspapers as long as a garden row, roll them up and store until spring. When you need mulch, unroll on the garden.

When I was a young, newly married gardening novice, we lived on the sea shore. A violent December storm drove high tides within a few feet of our front door. When the waters receded, a huge pile of eelgrass and seaweed ringed our home. Too lazy to cart it away, we raked the debris a few feet closer to the house and stuffed it under foundation plantings. Our shrubs got a bonanza of enriched soil and added trace minerals, and we, by accident, became mulching devotees. We noticed, for the first time, all the piles of free eelgrass sitting at the end of the street and carted it home to hold moisture in our sandy soil.

Wherever you live, it’s worth keeping year-round mulch under shrubs and trees to eliminate cultivating and weeding. Shredded bark, wood chips, cocoa bean hulls, pine needles, and leaf mold are all weed-free and pleasing to look at. Under broad-leaved evergreens, use a mulch of cottonseed meal or pine needles to make soil more acid. Outline the bed with folded newspapers before you add mulch — keeps a neat edge for a longer time.

“I laugh when I think of our first garden,” says Deirdre Kevorkian. “Spindly was the word for those plants. The garden was three times as big as this one, but we got much less produce.” Now she and Eric have raised beds in a modest twelve-foot by twenty-foot garden, framed with jaunty orange marigolds just inside pressure-treated 6″ x 6″ timbers. In their small patch, they mulch with grass clippings. Every time they mow, they add some more. They use an organic 5-10-5 for supplemental feeding. The carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, beans, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, cukes, and winter squash are healthy and bug-free. “I haven’t weeded yet this year,” Deirdre boasts. “It’s almost automatic. Plant, mulch, and wait. I love gardens, but I hate the work.”

Weed haters are alert for non-commercial sources of mulch. “I was jogging through a development one autumn and I met a man raking pine needles,” explains a New Hampshire woman. “We began talking, and soon I had a promise of an annual supply of pine needles for my acid loving plants (such as blueberries), and

I also talked him into organizing his neighbors to save leaves for me. Of course, I offered inducements. Every summer, I give each of them a supply of plastic bags to use for collecting my mulch in the fall, and at Christmas I thank them with candy. Each autumn, I cart away in my utility trailer twenty-two bags of pine needles and forty-four bags of leaves. They love me!”

Hay is a wonderful mulch for vegetables. Bales of hay separate easily into “;leaves,” slices which can be laid on soil between rows. Don’t worry about the weed seeds that sprout from the hay itself. Simply lay more hay on top, or roll it over. Hay transforms soil into black, fluffy loam.

Mulching Materials – from Hay to Z

Be imaginative in collecting mulching materials. Buy if you must, or scavenge from friends or local industries. Try:

• hay (a farmer might be delighted to unload spoiled bales)
• straw
• leaves (shred or rotary mow first)
• hulls or shells from cocoa beans, buckwheat, peanuts, rice,
• cottonseed, oats, or nuts
• grass clippings (ask your neighbors or a lawn-maintenance service
• to save them)
• wood chips (get them from a utility company pruning near overhead wires) (add nitrogen)
• shredded bark (add nitrogen)
• sawdust (add nitrogen) seaweed, kelp, eelgrass ground corn cobs and stalks (add nitrogen)
• shredded sugar cane
• packing materials (excelsior, shredded paper)
• salt hay
• coffee grounds
• partly finished compost pebbles
• ground oyster shells newspaper
• peat moss (it cakes, is really better dug into soil)

• Spanish moss
• tobacco stems (but keep them away from tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Smother the Weeds — with Mulch continue…

• Smother the Weeds — with Mulch
• Evergreen Organic Garden Mulches
• A Few Final Weed-Beating Ideas
• Green Garden, the Weed-Free Asparagus Bed
• Weed Plant Bedding, Try Black Plastic
• Here's my recipe for growing great strawberries continue...
• Four steps in making and using good garden compost
• How Does Your Garden Grow?
• Garden Plant Vegetables growing tips: The best way to grow an asparagus bed
• Plant Deeply to Grow Fuller Hills, a Second Billing, or Plant Potatoes under Mulch?