Mulch

Mulch serves many practical and ecological purposes in the garden.  For the lazy gardener or farmer, it is a means to cut back on weeding and watering chores.  Various mulch materials function in different ways.  Most mulches serve to preserve soil moisture by creating a buffer to limit evapotranspiration.  Mulches cover the soil surface, thus making a physical barrier to prevent weed growth that blocks out the sun.

Farmers often make use of black plastic mulch, a layer of black plastic secured over a row or bed.  For crops, holes are poked in the plastic and transplants or seeds are planted in.  Black plastic also absorbs the heat from the sun thus warming the soil it covers.  This mechanism can allow for earlier plantings of summer crops that require warm soil temperatures.  Black plastic can be preserved for up to a few seasons if treated super minimally, but, regardless of its life time, it is an inorganic material that ends up being pulled up and sent to the landfill.  Of course there are means for creative recycling of inorganic materials, but solarized black plastic is a nasty material that when pulled up often breaks apart into pieces.

The optimal mulch materials are those that are organic and can be broken down and used by soil organisms as food.  These materials include leaves, straw, hay, wood chips, compost, cardboard, newspaper, dried grass clippings and garden prunings, chopped up twigs, etc.  Utilizing organic mulch materials serves multiple purposes beyond those of inorganic materials as the mulch becomes a means for improving soil quality, soil structure and soil biology.  This, in turn, aids the growth and well-being of the crops grown where organic mulches are used. 

At our farm, Bottle Gourd Herbs at Historic Penn Farm, we utilize various organic mulch materials and methods.  Here we will share some images along with information about the organic mulches at work:

Pictured here is one of our hay-mulched keyhole planting beds.  The mulch layer is about 3-4 inches thick.  The bed was planted to bush beans, beets and calendula almost three weeks ago.  The only seedlings coming through are those of our crops.  At first there were stray pigweed or thistle that popped through but when picked out early that's about it for weeding in a thickly mulched bed.  

The cardboard you see (which is dry here - after rain all the ends flatten down) is one of the mulch methods we use to outcompete the grass in the pathways.  You can see to the left edge and in the yet un-mulched areas the thick grass.  Waste cardboard is a low-energy method for managing unwanted grass, particularly when compared to the continual mowing often used in row farming.  

    

When establishing transplants on cleared land, a hefty hay mulch ring around the seedling will prevent immediate competitors.  Be sure to leave a couple inches all around the stems of the transplants, like done for the pumpkin pictured here, to allow breathing room.  This pumpkin species is a Japanese kikuza (thanks, Shelby!)

Another mulching method is to thickly sow cover crops that will outcompete other weeds/grass.  Pictured here is dutch white clover sown in the path adjacent to a hay-mulched keyhole bed.  The clover was sown a little too late to outcompete most of the weeds, but you can get an idea of its function.  White clover is perennial and will come back next year after reseeding itself too.  We will see how it comes in next spring and overseed too.  Many farmers and home gardeners grow the low-growing dutch white clover right in their beds under crops like squashes, tomatoes, peppers, etc.  We will be doing the same in our large section of field planted entirely to vine crops.

Pictured here is a close up shot of our first radish bed, a trial bed for thickly sown, barely mulched growing beds.  Not only did grasses do a good job of inhabiting the bed, but some of the straw was not totally rotted and about a 1/3 of the grass you see here is wheat!  Nonetheless, the radishes grew beautifully, with robust leaves and distinct fine flavor to the root.  This can be owed in part to the ability of weeds or thickly planted vegetation to serve as a mulch.  The soil was also dug in with equal parts compost and fertilized with bio-active mineral meal.    

We sure love mulch and mulching.  If you have any questions about using organic mulches, please write to us at info@depermaculture.com  Feel free to leave a comment about your experiences with mulch materials, we'd be delighted to hear from you!

Soil Minerals

Inspired by the works of Masanobu Fukuoka and his students, the ethics and principles of permaculture and its applications around the world, the underground studies of soil fertility, the many creative ecological gardeners out there, and the overall philosophy of the lazy farmer, we work every day, a little bit each day, on our almost 1/2-acre plot of ground at Historic Penn Farm in New Castle, DE.  We are experiencing the evolutions that come with cultivation of land - the weeds that are born from the farmer's hoe, the opportunistic non-native invasives that take every chance at life on the full-sun woods' edge, the rabbits that inhabit the surrounding orchard grasslands taking interest in the tips of succulent cruciferous and beet family crops, and, strangely to us, the entire stems of young tomato plants, and the first signs of crop eating insects- letting us know that it will take some time before our implementation of soil fertility boosters will correct our soil imbalances.  We are on the most pocket change of budgets in this endeavor.  We hope to document and share some of the small investments that make large impacts on common issues of soil cultivation - the real work of farming.  First up: using mineral blends to balance soil chemistry.

While we would first happily digress into a formal introduction on soil minerals, we instead will point your attention to some online resources:

SoilMinerals.com
CropServicesIntl.com - and the book The Non-Toxic Farming Handbook
Acres USA Magazine

Soil chemistry balancing begins with a proper soil test with recommendations on mineral and biological applications specific to your soil's conditions.  However, when you have little to no budget, the second best option is a broad spectrum mineral meal.  Broad spectrum mineral meals include a host of natural rock and earth mineral sources together with biological activators such as beneficial bacteria and fungal species.  If your mineral meal does not come with biological activators, just find one that does!  SoilMinerals.com offers an Agricola mineral blend product, and CropServicesIntl.com offers a mineral meal called COMPLETE.  We at Delaware Permaculture have come to blend COMPLETE with rock phosphate and the trace mineral boron to address the particular soil needs of most soils of the Delaware and Southeast PA Piedmont regions and offer it in a product we call Bio-Pulvis found at the Delaware Permaculture Shop.

Applying mineral meals is like flouring a bread dough board or sprinkling fairy dust.  Safe to handle, just evenly disperse the powder on the surface of your soil then rake in or shovel under.  If you have raised beds, just water in thoroughly after applications.  If your beds are already planted and mulched, you can also sprinkle then water in thoroughly.  So here are some photos of us doing just this on our keyhole garden beds that were dug in with compost about 12 - 18" deep:

Note the light white powder dusting of Bio-Pulvis on the beds in foreground and behind

  

Adding Bio-Pulvis to mulched keyhole bed (can just make out the bean seedlings poking through)

First watering in to be followed by all day showers

Yes, it's that simple.  Later on, we will discuss foliar feeding of Bio-Pulvis with Fish Emulsion and Liquid Seaweed, so stay tuned!!  We welcome your inquiries at info@depermaculture.com