Companion Planting--The Lazy Gardener's Guide to Organic Vegetable Gardening by Jennifer Scarffe

Author:Jennifer Scarffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Organic gardening, vegetable gardening, organic vegetable gardening, companion planting, garden design, vegetable gardening design, horticultural advice, organic garden design, mulch, compost
Publisher: Green Earth Books
Published: 2019-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

What to Use

SO MANY THINGS! STAY away from synthetic, commercial mulches such as glass pebbles and plastic weed mat. They won't do your garden a stick of good and indeed some of the dyes used to achieve that uniform color across the artificial stones etc can leech toxins into your soil. Choose a natural substance and you'll soon find your mulch is doubling as a fertilizer and soil builder.

When it comes to natural mulches you have the option of making your own, finding free or cheaply available mulches from local businesses or buying a commercially produced organic mulch.

DIY Mulches

The simplest mulches can be found in your own garden. Rake up your fallen leaves and add them to the garden. Any time you weed or prune gather those clippings and heap them around your plants. Permaculture folk call this 'chop and drop'. Your lawn mower or weed-whacker (strong trimmer, whipper snipper etc) can be a great tool for getting prunings and clippings down to a decent mulching size. Simply lay a heap of clippings on the ground and run over them with the mower a few times. Rake up the results and you have instant, home made mulch.

Autumn leaves make some of the richest home made mulches available, but are often blown around the garden in their first year. Breaking them up with a lawn-mower helps, but if you have the room in your garden, put them away for a year to break down a little. Compost them for six months in a compost bin or bundle them up in garbage bags, or in a big plastic bin, and store them. A year later, they will be a much better consistency for mulch.

Other DIY mulches include old newspapers and cardboard. Wet them and lay them down as sheets to inhibit weed growth, or shred them and combine them with other mulches such as lawn clippings.

You can also grow your own mulches. Fast growing plants like comfrey, rocket, mustard, parsley can act as either a living mulch in some areas of your garden, or be deliberately grown in order to mulch other areas. Break off leaves as you need them, leaving the original plant to grow even more mulch.

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