when weeding the garden, i’ve never had the luxury of throwing straw over everything to mulch, it’s too expensive and my partner won’t spring for it. we have an abundant supply of mulch but it seems too hot to use. so, i’ve been throwing the weeds over the ground where they were pulled from with scant results.
butternuts are visible! (the space on either side will eventually be tilled again and mulched)
this spring, i had a duh! moment. when we mow our grass, we collect the clippings in a bag and generally feed the clippings to the sheep. well, once the pasture became abundant, they no longer ate it so we just piled it in the compost. that’s when i thought of using it for mulching the veggies in the garden.
i carefully piled it around the plants i wanted to keep as it got HOT really fast. but the heat is short lived so it seems to fry the baby weeds and leave the larger vegetables unscathed.
onions, carrots and turnips are not! (aka what the garden looks like w/o grass clipping mulch)
this has been a lifesaver. with the help of our wwoofers who are doing a bang up job of removing the weeds, piling the clippings on the rows and between them has made a marked difference in the weed control. it actually looks like i’m growing vegetables out there instead of weeds!
sweet potatoes are happily growing w/o competing with the weeds.
i love having these types of moments. it makes all the difference in the world with the ease of maintaining the garden.
next, getting greg to set a post and mount our extra mailbox to it for me to store twine, scissors and a hand spade in the garden for quick, easy access!
Good post. It seems I’m always on a quest for mulch also. I once managed to get some free sawdust locally, but I got the feeling that it was a one-time deal and I wasn’t welcome to do it again. (I think the owner was too worried about liability should I injure myself.) In my ornamental areas I use pine straw that I rake up at a neighbors house. This year in my veggie garden I was able to use a couple of bales of wheat straw my neighbor had left over from an autumn pumpkin/gourd display. I like using newspaper and holding the newspaper in place with sheets of the wheat straw. I also used large sheets of uncolored cardboard. This year I tried using Weed Block (a landscape fabric). It disintegrated in a few months. Disgusting! My son and I tried getting up the fragments of it just this morning. A heavier duty fabric might have worked better. I’ve known people to use old sheets of tin (now that will cook some weeds on a hot day!) and pieces of old carpet.
I think the bottom line is to do what you did – be resourceful and use what is available to you.
Great post! I got lucky last year and someone gave us 30+ bales of straw. This year, I used lots of oak leaves that fell in our driveway last fall. Wherever we don’t mulch, we have to pull weeds, and being an extremely lazy gardener that’s just not ok….
Ron
we love grass clippings, too. we are trying to eliminate lawn around here, but until we do the clippings are great mulch. we also feed it to our calves and put it in the chicken house run. we have been trying big strips of billboard tarp (free, would go into landfill) down the rows.
we used to buy full wheat hay for our cow and the waste made great mulch, but the bottom land has been flooded here too much for a wheat crop.
feed sacks make great mulch as well- opened flat and wetted down onto the ground. we buy our feed in bulk but it is bagged, so we have a lot of bags!
Love the little bit about the mailbox at the end of your post. I just set mine on a salvaged wire spool – storage and garden table all in one:
http://simple-green-frugal-co-op.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-hand-tool-shed.html
~Sadge