Wednesday, September 22, 2010

My first Mulch

Everyone has different natural resources on their homestead and one of the resources we have is a forest covered with a thick blank of pine straw that keeps everything, but the trees from growing.  I finally decided to take advantage of this and do my first mulching on the cucumbers I just planted.  I know now that if  I am watering it this small dead spot it will quickly come back to life and be covered with five foot tall grass shoots.
If this works well I imagine I will end up doing this in my regular garden because weeding has to be the worst part of gardening.  I would never buy mulch.  I just don't think I could bring myself to fork over the money to buy something to cover the dirt, but I will definintly wander out back and grab a load.  I don't own a wheel barrow, so I had to adjust and used the girls radio flyer to haul my loads from the dark forest out back to the spot where I have my cucumbers planted. 
After spreading it out I sprayed the whole thing down so that the mulch wouldn't blow away in the massive windstorm which is been ready to fire up all day.  I am not sure how close to the plants you are supposed to get so I left a good bit of space for watering.  I have enough I might try to dig up a left over bubbler valve from my sprinklers in vegas.  Then I can bury everything except the actual plant under the mulch and it will still get water.  I was hoping that this would start to make my garden beds look better, but when I uploaded this picture I realized that I am going for practical, not pretty.

2 comments:

  1. Another good, cheap way to haul things like that around is to use an old sheet. You just spread it out, pile your mulch (or whatever) onto it, pick up the four corners and carry the sheet like a sack. It will carry more than a Radio Flyer and is light.

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  2. That is a good idea. The mulch certainly isn't heavy, just bulky and awkward.

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