The allure of mulch
Why,
you ask, are we out cutting wood when we're trying to hurry up and
finish our homemade
storage building? Well, Monday it poured all day and the
creek went up, so when we headed out to work on Tuesday, we were
chagrined to discover that the screws we'd bought last weekend were on
the other side of a raging flood. Then we started pondering how
to seal in the skylight over Mark's loft in the new roof, and realized
that none of the roof sealants are going to dry properly at
temperatures hovering around freezing.
And, of course, there's
the siren song of mulch. We got in touch with one of our
neighbors this weekend and have decided to go in on renting an
industrial chipper one weekend soon. (At a lot of the rental
places, you can take a piece of equipment home on Saturday morning and
not have to return it until Monday morning for the price of a single
day since they're closed on Sunday.) We want to get the most bang
for our buck, so that means consolidating all of the brush into a few
big piles for easy access.
My mouth starts watering
every time I think of the chipper, and I keep having to remind myself
not to count my chickens before they hatch. But every brush pile
is already earmarked for a project. We've got two big piles of
pine limbs that I figure will make an awesome, acidifying mulch on our blueberries,
and a pile of freshly cut and fallen branches that will make a great
substrate for the King
Stropharia spawn we
plan to order in a few weeks. Then there are the three year old
brush piles that we originally planned to burn like our neighbors do,
but instead decided to let rot down --- I figure that these will turn
into instant, semi-composted mulch to go straight on perennials.
Hopefully, we'll have a few more afternoons to build our brush piles
before the chipper comes through.
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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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I think I need to make a t-shirt declaring it, I love mulch that much! So, you're not alone, I also think mulching is the best thing ever.
Do you till the mulch in at the end of the season or in the Spring or just move it aside and plant through it? We didn't do anything with the garden in the fall, other spread some more mulch and manure in some places, so now I'm faced with deciding whether to till in the big mat of straw where the squashes were, or just weed and plant in the same hills as before. Thoughts?
Bethany --- such a perfect t-shirt idea! Or maybe a bumper sticker. I very rarely find things I care enough about to put on a bumper sticker, but that would be one of them.
To answer your question --- we go no-till, so the goal is to just push back any mulch that hasn't rotted in when planting direct-seeded things (or planting through it when transplanting. That's mostly theoretical, though, since this year is the first one I've gotten my act together and actually mulched the annual beds.
(With perennials, I just keep layering more on top, with some manure thrown in for good measure.)
For your squash, first of all --- do you have another spot to rotate them to? You might get into disease trouble by planting them in the same spot for two years in a row. If not, I'd just rake back a little bit of mulch to plant the seed --- after all, squashes take up such a huge area beyond the part where you plant, and it's really nice not to disturb ground you don't have to so that you don't get weeds.
Brett --- you should wish you have neighbors like my neighbors, not like me. They're the ones with the big truck to haul the chipper, and who are hopefully even going to lend us their tractor to get the chipper back across the creek.
Erich --- we'd better get that roof on, then!!!
Daddy --- I remember you saying that. It must have been a leaf-specific experience --- the neighbors we're going in with rented one of these for tree limbs a few years ago and said it was awesome. Or maybe it was the quality of the machine?