Archives for posts with tag: sheet mulch

The straw came!

May 3, 2012 //

Awesome. Blue Seal dropped six bales off this afternoon. (Yeah, I know I should cultivate a local relationship, but then the driver was local, and we talked about gardening.)

Straw, seedless, and not hay, with seeds: We want to suppress weeds, not encourage them!

The straw is oat straw, unlike last year’s wheat straw (which Blue Seal says is hard to get right now). I don’t know if that will make a difference or not; the driver said no. So now all I have to do is promote some newspaper by May Day, and I’ll have the whole garden sheet mulched before I plant a thing.

And as I was looking for the photo, I had a horrible mental image: The bales covered with snow. Let’s hope this post exorcises that possibility!

Tags , , , , ,
Categories gardening, permaculture, sheet mulch

Title change: “The Lazy Gardener”

April 13, 2012 //

Because that’s what I am, and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of it!

I don’t like work. More subtly, I don’t like work that I shouldn’t have to do. I want the maximum yield for the minimum effort, defining yield not just as food, but as pleasure: Simply sitting in the sun in the lawn chair, listening to bees bumbling by, and spotting the occasional hummingbird counts for a lot, or would, if we could count pleasure. Why would I want to be working if I don’t have to?

That’s why I like sheet mulch. No weeding and very little watering. Weeding is work; it is, in fact, “stoop labor.” Why would anybody want to do it if they can avoid it? Peasants by the millions leave the country for the city to avoid it! Ditto watering (which if you’re not capturing it also costs money).

And that’s why I like winter sowing. Put the seeds in the milk jugs, set the milk jugs out, wait two months, boom. (Not to tempt the evil eye: No more milk jugs than yesterday’s have sprouted!* Still, it’s not really warm yet [crossed fingers]). No grow lights (money). No peat pots, or any other kind of pot (money). No trays (money). No moving trays about the house and then out in the garden (work). You get the idea.

I hope throughout the growing season I’ll have many more opportunities to explain how lazy I am!

I’m still “The iPad Gardener, though.” Using the iPad, for me, is all about learning to see. It’s not about using garden software to help me make decisions. I think I’ll make good decisions — that is, decisions that help me avoid work — only by really seeing what’s happening on this patch of land, and garden software, at best, operates at the level of climate zone, and not even micro-climate).

NOTE * IIRC, the rule of thumb is that 75% of milk jugs germinate. In past years, I have done much better than that.

Tags , , , , , , ,
Categories gardening, permaculture, sheet mulch, winter sowing

A garden clothed in words

April 6, 2012 //

Literally! Because sheet mulching with newspapers does just that: It covers the garden with words. Maybe that’s why I like to use newspapers and not cardboard or leaves.

Except the raspberry patch pictured here I never did sheet mulch, so where that upside down “of” came from — word, sentence, or page — I don’t know. Except that it came from somewhere else.

In the growing season, these beds I covered with seafood compost, and over that I laid down long cut grass from the remaining lawn-like areas. (I don’t use a mower because that’s too much like work; instead, I let the grass grow long and cut big swatches of it with garden shears for green manure and a light block, both together). The raspberries were happy, and the weeds were well controlled (though you can see evil Norway Maple seed pods trying to gatecrash by hiding in the straw). The straw I laid down at the end of the season, along with leaves.

And now it’s spring again, and here come the violets, poking up through the straw. And now I have to start buying the paper again!

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories compost, flowers, gardening

Lilacs pushing ahead to spring

March 30, 2012 //

Two days of snow and a bit of cold didn’t harm the buds at all. Though they didn’t make any progress, either; they’re the same size as last week. Then again, maybe they’re as big as they get, and now some internal, enflowering, process takes over. I guess we’ll see! Which is the nice thing about taking pictures every day; it sharpens the vision.

Yeah, “haybale ties.” Orange, petroleum-based. Ick. I think they’re straw bales, actually, for sheet mulch (no seeds). But “hay bales” are what we call them, straw though they may be… Anyhow, I cheat: I order mine from Blue Seal!

Tags , , , , , , ,
Categories gardening, permaculture, snow

Straw without bricks

March 28, 2012 //

Here’s the straw layer of the sheet mulch I laid down over the new beds near the sidewalk I’m going to plant this year, when I figure out what I want to plant. Despite being near the traffic, it’s in good shape.

I didn’t border these beds with bricks because bricks are pricey, and I haven’t discovered any chimneys being demolished around town, which is where I got the last batch from. But logs do the trick!

Notice how the Norway Maple Leaf is disfigured with cancerous dark-colored spots. That tree is a disease vector I should cut down, dry, and then heat the house with, although I do use the leaves to bank the house and mulch the beds. Trade-offs!

And I don’t know what that seed pod is; I grew some snow peas last year, but this looks like a pretty big pod for a snow pea. Maybe I’m being sent a message about what to grow in the new beds!

Tags , , , , ,
Categories gardening, path, permaculture, sheet mulch
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 31 other followers