Sheet Mulch Much?

Let me set the record straight.  Mulch and I never really got very far.  I don't know...I guess mulching was just not part of my basic understanding of gardening.  When I think about the gardening I was around as a kid, I don't remember much mulch.   I thought gardening was: you till the soil, you plant what you want to grow in rows, and you pull all the other shit out.  If I think really far back the only mulches I remember are a bark mulch around some shrubs in our front yard, and some kind of wood chips, maybe cedar mulch, around my Grandma Betty's Carver County Fair prize winning roses.   There was probably much more mulch back then, but for whatever reason the practice didn't follow me into adulthood.  

I didn't mulch much in Brooklyn.  I only put leaves on the garden beds some winters, but I cleared them and tossed them as soon as I planted in the Spring.  The soil remained bare during the growing season, aside from the veggies and flowers I planted. One time I mulched around the rose bushes with cedar.  But I didn't really keep it replenished in subsequent years.  

When I first started a veggie patch in Brooklyn, my landlord's gardener instructed me to use newspaper - to lay out sheets and water them and throw some leaves on top.  This was done in the Fall over a large area of the yard that had been used to grow veggies a few years ago and then had been covered with weeds. This was basic sheet mulching, although I didn't know it at the time. 

I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and spoke with a gardening expert.  He instructed me to poke through the mulch to plant in the Spring.   But that just didn't compute to me.  "What do you mean?" I thought. "Where's the damn dirt?  You put plants in black dirt, not leaves!"  So in the Spring I pulled all the leaves off and threw them away.  The newspaper had decomposed.  

Fast forward six or seven years.   Now I'm in Beacon reading about the amazing benefits of sheet mulching in the book Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway.   And I am convinced.  I will be a master mulcher.  

So I decided to go for it.  I went to the dump and jumped in the cardboard recycling bin and pulled out all the large pieces of cardboard I could find.  They thought I was nuts.  

It was November and the neighbors all had bags of leaves out by the curb.  I went down the blog and grabbed up all their leaves.  They thought I was nuts.  

I hit the jackpot at Home Depot.  They're compost and cow manure was on clearance.  They were clearing out the gardening aisles to make room for the snow blowers.  I filled our Honda Fit full of it.  And I bought some straw bales there too.  

The Fit full of Shit.  

This made an incredible mess:

My friends Josh and Jen keep chickens.  I gladly took some of their chicken manure when they offered.  

I had my materials gathered.  Now I was waiting for the rest of our leaves to fall, and trying to finish the daikon and greens that we still had in the veggie patch.   

During Thanksgiving weekend, it was finally time.  I pulled the remaining veggies, slashed the rye grass cover crop and tossed a little of my vermicompost under where I was going to lay the cardboard.   There were a few worms mixed in and I thought some of them might help - I was doing some worm inoculation.  Later I read that red wigglers are purely domestic now and that they don't survive outside.  Oh well, I had plenty.  Sorry worms, hopefully the birds ate you. 

Before:  Some veggies and some Rye Grass cover crop

The final harvest.  Greens, Daikon, Beets.

I laid out the cardboard in a pattern similar to keyhole beds - another permaculture design technique.  If I were to do it over I would cover the entire space with the cardboard, including the foot paths, so that weeds would be kept down in the paths as well.  

Then I spread a thin spotty layer of vermicompost over the cardboard, along with some of the compost I purchased.  

Then went on the leaves.  A ton of them.  I was trying to go eight to twelve inches deep.  

I sprinkled some of that chicken manure on top of the leaves.  There really wasn't too much of that to go around, but I trust it was a good addition.    

After that was a compost layer that I wanted to be two inches thick, but was hardly an inch.  I didn't have enough, and Home Depot didn't have it anymore.  I guess I could've checked some of the other garden centers, which I'm happy to say I've come to appreciate a lot recently.  I rarely buy garden stuff at Home Depot any more.  But I didn't want to spend more money on compost.  In fact I actually bought more on the first trip than I had originally planned just because it was on clearance.  Anyway, the compost layer was thin.  

On top of this went the straw.  My wife Akiko helped me with this step because the sun was setting.  The straw went a long way actually, to our delight.  

Straw!  Photo taken the next day.  

Then that mighty mulch sat there over the winter, breaking down just a little.  We didn't have a very cold winter and we only had a handful of light snowfalls.  I thought if we had had a couple big snowfalls the mulch would've broken down more.  

As the mulch mulched over the winter, I read more and found some videos on the Internet that explained different ways of sheet mulching.  As Spring sprung however, it was clear that this mulch was not going to be soil this year. I had read that it takes a few years for a sheet mulched bed to really find it's prime.  But I thought it would look a little more like soil by this time.  Once again, where's the damn dirt!?  How was I going to plant in this pile of the neighbor's leaves?  You don't plant in leaves.  You plant in dirt dammit.  

Hemenway's instructions were to plant into the compost layer that was beneath the top straw layer. As I mentioned earlier, the said layer was pretty anemic in my bed.  

In a Vimeo video Bill Mollison instructed people to top the straw with little areas of soil where you put your plants in.  Hemenway mentioned this too.  Tubers were to be planted into the soil beneath the cardboard, via poked holes.  

In a YouTube video, Geoff Lawton instructed to poke through to cardboard to plant all plants.  

I decided to do a combination of all three instructions.  For my established starter plants I scratched down to my pathetic compost layer, added a generous amount of additional compost, put the plant in, then replaced the straw.  If the mulch layer was not very thick where I was putting a seedling in (I am a messy gardener), I poked through the cardboard and went into the soil.  

For a few polyculture rows - a mixed planting semi-experiment - I scraped away all the straw and added generously to the compost layer.  It wasn't on clearance this time, but it didn't take too much additional compost to beef it up.   After sowing the polyculture beds, I partially replaced the straw, but I thought the straw layer should be thin.  I was worried that the sprouts wouldn't make it through the straw.  How would they find the light?  I think had mulchiphobia.   

My spuds are growing in two potato towers, separate from the main garden bed.  I'll explain that in another post.  

So, how is it going, you ask?  Well the good news is the garden is seriously weed free.  I've pulled a few maple tree saplings that were surely mixed with the leaves I used.  I've pulled a  couple of grass stalks here and there.  Easy to spot and easy to pull.  Not much harm done.  Other than that, not one real weed.  The foot paths that I mentioned earlier haven't been an issue because much of the straw I removed from the polyculture beds is covering them, keeping weeds down. 

The other good news is that the mulched beds hold water like an old man's sprained ankle.  Even after a long dry hot spell, there's plenty of moisture.  I'm very satisfied with that.  

The other other good news is that I'm pretty sure every earthworm in the neighborhood is in my vegetable patch.  They're doing a great job decomposing the stuff.  And the birds are all up in there having lunch, turning and aerating it while they dine. 

I found several friends like this when I planted.  Have you ever seen such a happy healthy worm?  

The bad news is that all the slugs came along with worms.  I think I've created a perfect slug habitat.  Shelter from the sun, moisture, plenty of young delicious veggies to chomp on, and no predators except for me.  According to Bill Mollison, I don't have a slug problem, I have a duck deficiency.  Love it, but I'm not allowed to keep ducks in the city of Beacon.  As for creating conditions for ducks to happen naturally, well, I'd have to create conditions for a big pond to happen naturally - not likely to happen.  For now I have some slug control techniques I'm working with, and I have a lot of plant mass.  Things are holding up fine for the post part.  

Like I mentioned earlier, it takes a few years for sheet mulched beds to hit their prime.  Some of the smaller transplants I put in didn't really get going before becoming slug lunch.  I was probably getting a little too excited and planted them too early.   The larger seedlings are standing up to the slugs, and things are really starting to grow now.  It seems like June came and all of a sudden we had way more greens than we could eat.  Delicious home grown salads every day!  

Squirrels have a great time digging through the mulch.  They did some much needed thinning for me.  

Another observation regarding the leaves I used.  I used them because they were readily available and free.  I've noticed that in some places, perhaps depending on how they fell, they actually keep water from penetrating.  They formed a bit of a mat.   But it's only in a few sporadic spots and I could simply mix it up a bit if it doesn't correct itself.  Another improvement might be to shred the leaves next time. They would probably break down faster then and might not be as water tight.  I have a leaf blower that can suck leaves into a bag.  It shreds them a bit in the process.  I might try that next time, although I would probably need many more leaves to start.  

Overall I have to say that I'm happy with the sheet mulch vegetable garden experience so far.   I don't have to weed at all.  I just have to pick slugs.  But you know what, I picked a ton of slugs in Brooklyn when I didn't mulch, actually probably more, and I had to pick weeds along with them.  

Some shots of the sheet mulched veggie patch as of June 2:

Just today I completed another sheet mulch project.   I planted two raspberry bushes last Fall.  Before doing that, I cleared the weeds out of the corner of the yard where I planted the raspberries.  This area is full of Yellowdock and Burdock, which has deep tap roots, nearly impossible to fully eradicate.  So they came back as expected.  There was also a lot of garlic mustard, mugwort, Virginia creeper, and garlic.   

It was almost getting hard to see the raspberries, so I thought sheet mulching would be a good idea.  I went to the dump again and this time filled four lawn bags full of wood chips, then once again I raided the cardboard bin.  And once again they thought I was nuts.  

I pulled the Yellowdock as best I could, knowing I wouldn't get all the roots.  I discarded the root fragments but scattered the leaves all around the bed, enjoying the fact that the nutrients that those taproots had mined and deposited in the Yellowdock leaves would be slowly composting under my cardboard layer.  I chopped and dropped everything else except a couple of nice burdock plants.   I thought they would be good to leave around as a future chop and drop crop.   Again, nutrients from deep down, and an indestructible plant that I can keep chopping and dropping.  Plus they looked like good burdocks to harvest for food if I'm ever ready to dig my butt off.  

Then I laid out my cardboard leaving plenty of room around the raspberries so new shoots can come up.  By the time the raspberries are really ready to expand outward in a couple years, I expect the cardboard will be broken down or at least easy for them to punch through.  Some Yellowdock will probably come back up soon near the raspberries, but I'll just happily chop and drop them to keep them under control and feed the raspberries.  I also went around some peonies in the area.  

On top of that went the wood chips.  These chips are not as uniform and pretty as the ones you buy from the store, but they look pretty nice in the end.  And the price is right!  Hopefully there's no alien life forms in there.   I'll try it this time and see what happens.   

A few weeks ago I did a similar sheet mulch to some beds around the front and side of the house using purchased cedar mulch.  It's keeping the weeds down very well, and looks quite nice. 

So I guess I'm a converted mulcher.  I will be mulching much more in the future!