Smother the Weeds — with Mulch

The queen of mulch was Ruth Stout, author of How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back. She maintained a year- round hay mulch at least eight inches deep in her Connecticut vegetable garden. In her fifty-by-fifty-foot plot, she used twenty-five bales a year. She never turned the soil, sowed a cover crop, hoed, weeded, watered, or built a compost pile. She 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. She 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, she 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.

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.

Around fruit trees, fashion a trunk guard of hardware cloth to keep mice from nibbling, leave an air space next to the trunk, spread a thick layer of newspaper to the drip line of the branches, and cover generously with hay.

If you mulch your strawberries with grain straw, you could be planting trouble. The seeds will reach the ground and grow like weeds. Avoid this trouble by breaking open the bales and wetting them so all seeds will sprout before the mulch is used.

If you raise blueberries, you know the chore that weeding around them can be. A little work in September will save you hours of work next spring and summer. Mulch the bushes with ground pine bark, pine needles, or well-rotted sawdust. Spread mulch at least four inches deep, so that it will be at least two inches deep when it settles.

Peppers respond best to dark-colored mulches.

Carrots love coffee grounds, applied sparingly. Add a touch of lime to offset acidity.

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