The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Mulching

Mulched base of tree.This is the season when you can easily lose your garden if you don't keep the weeds below the level of the emerging seedlings.  So, for days and days and days, our outdoors chores have consisted of hours and hours and hours of weeding and mowing.  I can't speak for Mark, but I'm heartily sick of it.

But Thursday afternoon I took a little break to mulch.  This is the dessert, the gravy at the end of weeding.  Well-rotted wood chips, streaked with white lines of mycelia, sodden with imbibed rainwater.  I can't really explain why I love mulching --- maybe because I know that for every hour I spend mulching, it saves three or four hours of later weeding, maybe because I know the mulch will break down and feed my perennials.  Regardless, I feel revived enough to carry on weeding like crazy for another couple of weeks until the garden is safe.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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