Covid Journal, Day 107: The Mulch Garden

73 this morning, foggy and overcast. Much too warm for 6 a.m. 

We've been lucky. We managed to get through June without the air conditioner, and were comfortable until last night. The house stayed at 81 degrees all night, too hot for good sleep. Both of us were restless and woke frequently. So today, the AC is on. Funnily enough, it's still perfectly comfortable on the porch under the ceiling fan, if we sit still. But just try doing anything that requires movement!
We'll see how the days go. Probably we will follow the same routine as past years, turning the AC off at night, and back on somewhere between noon and 3pm, depending.

I wanted to recap why we use so much mulch. In the 1970's there was a lady name Ruth Stout who wrote for Organic Gardening magazine. She never plowed or tilled her garden; she simply covered it with mulch, then pulled the mulch aside to hoe a little row and plant her seeds and plants. She didn't fertilize or use pesticides either. I was fascinated.

My first husband and I tried it once, when I was 21, I think, to grow potatoes. When we pulled the mulch aside, we found baby snakes and mostly rotten potatoes. The problem was that we put the potatoes in a wet area, not a good garden spot. We didn't try it again there, but over the years I've mulched off and on and always like the results. I've never seen a snake, rat, mole or other critter in my mulch since then, although we do have these in our area for sure. I will add that I've never tried growing potatoes in much again, but maybe I will sometime in the future.

The onions are laid over now, drying the tops before we pull them. With this heat, it should only be a couple days before they're ready to pull. Beets are in the foreground.

The leeks really liked the mulch last year. They are beginning to grow pretty fast now.

We use cardboard, with hay on top. We have not yet tried Ruth Stout's way of not plowing or tilling, but we plan to next year on at least one of our gardens. We've been using cardboard for three years, counting this year. But we plowed it under and tilled it in. This year we're going to leave it alone, and come spring we'll just pull the mulch aside and plant,adding more cardboard and more hay on top of the old stuff.

Larry likes to grow cucumbers on a fence, and it does make them easier to pick. They also take up a lot less space and have less disease.

 The benefits of mulch gardening are many: the soil stays moist, and helps deflect the damage from pounding rainstorms by allowing the water, or most of it, to absorb into the mulch. The rain carries nutrients from the rotting mulch to the soil below. As the mulch breaks down, it builds up the soil. Weeds are mostly stifled by the mulch, and those that do come up are easily pulled. I just lay the pulled weeds on top of the mulch. We can get in the garden whenever we want--doesn't matter if it just rained. The mulch stabilizes the soil temperature so that it's not as affected by extreme heat or cooler temperatures. And next year, we will be able to plant our rows closer together since we don't have to allow room for the tiller. I am thinking of planting in patches rather than rows; I did that in parts of the garden last year and got a lot more use of the space available.

So that's all about the mulch. You can find a video of Ruth Stout talking about her garden (she was still gardening when she was in her 90's!) by googling Ruth Stout garden. She wrote some books too, but those are out of print and hard to find. Here's a link to her video, and to another video I think is really good on this topic. I may not have a garden exactly like hers, but I hope to get close to it.

Have you tried mulch gardening? Pros and cons, from your experience?

Meals yesterday: already noted breakfast; lunch was leftover rice dish again, with mixed vegetables from the freezer and peaches from the cellar. 

Meals today: scrambled eggs with salsa, biscuits and jelly. Lunch--raspberry and white chocolate scones from Schwan's ready-to-bake. A luxury and probably not good for us, but oh well. Dinner: fish, homemade mac & cheese, broccoli from the freezer. I guess you've noticed we don't eat fancy, and we don't mind having the same thing day after day at all! Cooking to have leftovers means less time in the kitchen for me. Breakfast is almost always eggs. Such creatures of habit, we are.


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