Mulch For the Garden

  I've been concerned about the soil in my garden this year. I added a fresh a couple of inches of compost to most of raised beds this spring.

A couple of the beds had something growing in them, so I couldn't dig the compost into the existing soil there.

 

And it turns out that a couple of inches of compost on top of good soil isn't actually a good thing. Seeds wouldn't germinate in those beds. I planted some starts, sometimes the same variety as the failed seeds, and they grew just great. It's Not unusual for me to keep things growing all winter long in three or four of the beds.

 

So that got me thinking of other ways to improve my soil.

 

A secondary issue was with the top of the soil drying out, while the soil underneath stayed nice and moist. So some beds were getting over watered, while shallow-rooted plants would dry out.

 

The third issue is the common enemy of gardens. Weeds. I wanted to try to minimize the number of weeds that got started.

So I am mulching with wood chips. I put down a layer of pretty fine mulch: a mix of sawdust, sand, grass clippings, and a little compost, maybe half an inch.

 

Then I am adding wood chips over the top. It seems important that these are what I call full range wood chips, not all one size, but the full branch or the full tree, chipped up. There is a place in town where I can get a lot of these chips, if I'm willing to haul them myself. So I did.

 

In several of the beds with larger plants, Tomatoes, squashes, garlic etc, I added three or four inches of wood chips.

The idea is that over time, the wood chips on the bottom will compost, adding to the quality of the soil, keeping it loose for the plants. 

 

The top of the chips, being in the sun and weather, will compost much more slowly, giving stray weed seeds no room to germinate. 

 

When I plant seeds and starts next spring, I will dig down to the top of the actual soil, and plant them there. I have already planted several tomato starts (these were weeds that grew up throughout the gardens) in the chips on one of the beds. Seems to work pretty well.

 

So I have added the chips to about half of the beds. This winter, I will add chips to the rest of the beds. But I wanted to give them a head start on composting.

 

I have one compost bin full of chips, with the idea that it would break down a little over the next few months. I decided I needed to help the process some.

 

So I mixed those chips with fresh compost. That compost is about 1/3 grass clippings, 1/3 used pine chips from the chicken coop, and 1/3 soil from the top of the chicken yard. It's pretty rich.

 

So I've mixed all that together, and it's going to compost for the rest of the summer, and the fall. I'm expecting that it will do pretty nicely for garden beds mulch.

 

And just to be thorough, I added a couple of scoops of red worms from the worm bin. I'm not sure they will survive, but if they do, they will expedite the breakdown of these chips.

 

In future years, all I should need to do is add another inch or two of chips on the top of the beds. We'll see how well that works.