Smother the Weeds — with Mulch

I maintained a year- round hay mulch at least eight inches deep in her Connecticut vegetable garden. In her fifty-by-fifty-foot plot, I used twenty-five bales a year. I never turned the soil, sowed a cover crop, hoed, weeded, watered, or built a compost pile. I just mulched, making compost on the spot, for as the bottom layer of mulch decomposed, it added rich organic matter to the soil— a continuing process. Ruth didn’t bother with manures, but used cottonseed meal or soy bean meal for added nitrogen. I sprinkled it on top of the mulch in winter, at a rate of five pounds to one hundred square feet, so that snow and rain carried it down through the hay by planting time. To plant, I pulled aside the mulch and sowed the seed.

Mulch saves weeding, which should make afficionados of all lazy gardeners. Add to that its other virtues. Mulch:

• Conserves moisture. Mulchers rarely, if ever, water crops.
• Reduces compaction of soil when people walk on it.
• Keeps hard rain from pounding and compacting soil.
• Prevents erosion.
• Keeps dirt from splashing on crops during rains, so you spend less time washing leaf crops after harvest.

• Protects sprawling crops like tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, and squash from direct contact with soil, so there is less chance for rot.
• Helps maintain an even soil temperature — helps it stay cooler during baking summer days and warmer during chilly spring and fall nights.
• Encourages earthworms

• As it decomposes, mulch improves the tilth and fertility of soil.

In northern climates, year-round mulch may not work as well as in moderate and southern zones. Tomatoes, for instance, are unhappy in cold soil. Beans need warm soil for germination. Mulch keeps soil from warming up in early spring. Pull it back in planting areas for heat-loving crops so that the soil can bake for a week or two before planting time.

Some northern gardeners till or cultivate until the ground warms up, then mulch for the rest of the summer.

Before you mulch for the first time, add extra nitrogen to the soil. As soil organisms decompose the bottom layer of mulch, they use the nearest available nitrogen — robbing it from the soil if necessary. This problem is greatest with mulching materials low in nitrogen, such as sawdust, leaves, wood chips, or ground corn cobs. If your plants begin to look yellow or stunted, that could mean they’re starving for a shot of nitrogen. Run out there quickly, manure tea or any high-nitrogen fertilizer in hand (sodium nitrate, urea, calcium nitrate, or lawn fertilizer). Once the mulching process gets under way, you can add new mulch on top of old without worry

Make sure your soil is thoroughly damp before applying mulch. Otherwise, you’ll be maintaining soil dryness instead of conserving soil moisture.

Don’t be a miser with mulch. Make it thick enough so it can do its job of surpressing weeds. Coarse mulches, such as hay or straw need to be eight to twelve inches deep. Finer mulches can be applied more thinly. Something as fine as coffee grounds needs to be only one-half inch thick. When in doubt, add a little extra; it settles more quickly than you think.

It’s easier to spread mulch on your entire garden, then part it and plant, than it is to wait until crops are up before mulching.

If you do it the hard way, you have the tedious work of placing mulch between and around young plants, and that takes a lot more time.

Save your old newspapers — but not the color pages — for mulches. Lay them two or three sheets thick wherever you don’t want weeds to grow. The papers will gradually disintegrate, and when they do, just add more. Don’t like the looks of them in your garden? Then try laying a thicker layer first — eight or ten sheets — and covering with a thin layer of straw or some other more attractive mulch. This covering will also keep wind from lifting the newspaper.

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