Organic Mulching

I have been trying to fit in as much gardening as I can between all of the much needed rain we have been getting.  My primary focus right now is getting my vegetable garden going.  I did plant some seeds and seedlings but my primary concern this week was getting some mulch down on my garden paths.  I did a lot of work weeding and the last thing I want is to have that be a routine!

I decided that since I had so much mulch leftover from my flower beds that I'd use it in the garden too.  The past couple of years I had stuck with using mostly the wood shavings that they use as pet bedding since my local garden center told me that organic gardeners use it.  It came in huge containers and while I loved it, I did have an issue with it breaking down too fast on my paths and letting weeds through.  It did work really well over the actual soil next to my plants though.  I think part of the issue was that we had tilled a grassy area the fall before the first planting and not all of the grass died or was removed properly.

This beautiful mulch I used is hemlock ... and no, it's not poisonous.  That is a different plant altogether.  I am eager to see if it has any impact on repelling insects.  I did notice it doesn't seem to bother my resident population of spiders.  These little guys move so fast I haven't been able to get a photo but I am thankful for their presence before my vegetables are even growing.  They will help a lot with pests that want to eat my plants.

Mounding isn't complicated and doesn't cost anything!  No raised bed kits and no fussiness.  It's great for drainage, which I have an issue with, as well as helping the soil temperature. I used soil that was enriched with well composted turkey poo!

One other type of mulching I have used was something I learned from a very successful local organic farmer.  He uses no till methods, doesn't even own a tractor and his yields are amazing!!  As you can see from the photos I use mounding as I learned from him.  He mulches between the mounds primarily with leaves.  Yes, leaves do take a few years to break down completely, longer if you have oak, but by the time it breaks down it's ready to be raked up onto the mounds and be utilized by the pants.  I tried doing this myself a few times but my backyard is really flat and the wind cuts across it enough so that all of the leaves were blown out eventually.  When they do stay, they do a great job preventing weeds.

If the mounds do wash down a bit, it's easy enough to re-cut the path by lifting the soil back on the mound as I did here.  This is first time in two years I have had to do this!

I also had great success mulching with pine needles!!  I know what you're thinking... Doesn't that add too much acidity to our already acidic soil?  This same farmer used it around his corn with great success.  When I grew corn a couple of years ago I literally walked down into my woods where a group of pine trees was growing and raked some up.  I put it around all of my corn and the plants didn't mind it at all.  And you know how well it is with controlling weeds!

As for mulch I don't really recommend?  Hay!!  All it takes is a few days of plentiful rain and you will have it growing, and fast! I know people also use grass clippings but if you are an organic grass grower too, there is too high of a chance of getting weed seeds.  And if you're not, you're putting herbicide and chemical fertilized clippings in your garden and it kind of defeats the purpose of organic gardening if you ask me.  You can also use straw but make sure that it is from somewhere reputable.  I used it before and it had seeds in it which completely defeated the purpose!

I have also heard of a method where people put down cardboard as a weed and grass killer as well as a mulch.  Personally, I am not a fan of this method.  Just the thought of all of that glue and ink being broken down into soil that my family's food will grow from doesn't appeal to me.  I'd rather recycle it.  I don't know anything else about it but I would do some research before going that route.

As far as mulching around the growing plants, I definitely recommend doing this if you don't like constant weeding!  As I mentioned, you can use the pet bedding, untreated of course, but expect to have to refresh it during the season.  Ask your supplier for the correct type before you buy it!  The before-mentioned farmer, whose name I will be sure to dig up for you because I am so grateful to him for how much I learned from him, uses literally tons of what you would expect to find in the compost bin.  Lettuce leaves, coffee grounds and even eggs shells.  He has his staff make runs to local restaurants and grocery stores to pick up their non-animal waste "garbage."  I didn't get to ask him if he had an issue with insects but decided to try it myself.  I have to say that it breaks down so quickly in the sun that I didn't have any issues.

Before you try any kind of mulch, make sure you do your research and ask people who have used it.  One of these years I would really like to try growing a cover crop and planting through the dead stalks that are laying on the ground at the end of the season.  I'll bet this would be a great method for growing pumpkins!!

First herbs and new perennials

With a sunny, gorgeous day finally upon us after several days in a row of rain, I decided it was a good day to at least get my front beds weeded and mulched.  We are still under average for precipitation since January but we seemed to have been making up for it recently.  Looking at the forecast, I knew I had to get this done now because our next days of no rain won't be here until the weekend.  Looking at the forecast beyond that tells me that I need to spend the weekend doing more work in the vegetable garden.

Since I wrote my book about herbs, The Herbal Beverage Book, the question I get asked the most is which ones do I grow personally.  I have been living back in New England only for a few years so I really haven't had the chance to get many going but here are a few:

While I didn't put this one in my book, I have six thriving comfrey plants.  These are three of my smallest just breaking out for the spring.  My comfrey oil was amazing at helping my broken foot heal a couple of years ago.

These are three small lavender plants I picked up last year from the local farmer's market just popping up.  They may be tiny now but just wait until the end of the season!

 

Not the prettiest right now but this is spearmint I planted on the hill next to our driveway.  I was fortunate enough to have found a local gardener at the NOFA-NH Spring conference a couple of years ago that had a very old patch that needed dividing.  She let me have six big divisions and each already has spread to a ten foot area.  They have a huge hill to fill to keep the dirt where it is with only wildflowers and sweet fern as competition.

This is lemon balm I also picked up from our local farmer's market.

As for other perennial edibles I have only planted strawberries.  I have about two dozen plants in two separate beds that have been doing very well.  I recently picked up a few rhubarb rhizomes that I am going to get in the ground this weekend.  Strawberry pie isn't complete without a little rhubarb!

My everbearers :-)  They have gotten HUGE since this photo I took a week ago!

I have also always enjoyed flower gardens and have left some pretty nice ones behind for the new owners of our last few houses.  I haven't done a lot yet at this house but can't wait to get some planted and see how they do.  I got a couple planted yesterday and it's at least a start.

My five year old daughter names these perennial poppies she picked out "Lala"!

First container of the year... and she named this plant "George"!

Phlox has always been a favorite of mine!

The builder's landscapers at least planted some daisies!

I have so much more to add to my beds but at least I have a good start :-)

Wild Edibles with Russ Cohen

Last night the Rockingham Herb Society sponsored a free presentation on Wild Edibles by Russ Cohen.  I was ecstatic to have just happened to see the listing for it in our local paper.  It’s one thing to own Russ Cohen’s book Wild Plants I Have Known… And Eaten and yet another to get more information in person.

I discovered that many of the plants I was pulling from my vegetable garden for the past two seasons have actually been edible.  And they were nice specimens at that!  The deep roots that took me several attempts at pulling before I dug down deep enough to pull it out were large, healthy Burdock!  This spring, I had hesitated to pull out anything that wasn’t grass because I knew I was going to this talk.  I am so glad I did!  It turns out that all of the purple flowers that are coming up in my prepared beds are edible violets!

At the end of the two-hour slide show, attendees got to try Japanese Knotweed squares that Russ brought for everyone and they were absolutely delicious.  He has a recipe for Strawberry Knotweed pie in his book if any of you have a knotweed issue.  I also have to mention I thoroughly enjoyed the snacks the Rockingham Herb Society members baked as well!

I left with a list of native plants that I am planning on adding to my landscape including Basswood, Bayberry, Sweet Cicely, Juneberry, Daylily, Wineberry and Black Cherry; just to mention a few.  As I add them to my landscape I will talk more about each of the plants as well as why I am choosing the sites I am planting them in.  I am hoping to attend one of his upcoming wild edible plant walks that are on his calendar very soon.  I have 10 acres of walkable woodlands and I just know they are filled with even more edibles than he covered last night!

As a side note, as I was writing this blog for you I received a notification that a local Edible Forest Gardening event that I was on the waiting list for just had a spot open up for me.  I just love how when you are truly aligned with what you want to do, things open up for you without you having to do much of anything.

For any of my local readers, The Rockingham Herb Society is having a herbal plant sale on June 2^nd right in the center of Chester, NH.

Edible Forest Gardening in NH - The Beginning!

The moment I first walked around our new house in New Hampshire at the beginning of April 2009 I knew I was home.  I hadn’t seen the property in person and only saw photos before my husband wrote an offer.  This would be the fifth house we were buying and I trusted that my husband knew what I liked and what was most important to me.  So after selling our house in Charlie Daniels' home town, we packed up and literally drove up to New Hampshire to sign the papers and move in.

The photos I had seen of the place didn’t do it justice.  I was more than thrilled with everything inside the house but just as thrilled, if not more so, by what was outside.  At the very top of my list of what I wanted… what I needed…  was space.  I wanted to live in a place where I couldn’t see into my neighbor’s yard and they couldn’t see into ours.  I also didn’t want to live in a neighborhood controlled by a homeowner’s association.  I was tired of having to ask permission to plant a tree or garden.  Being forced to use chemical fertilizers and herbicides regularly wasn’t my idea of freedom.

Our pool area in TN.  Most private at night!

One of our attempts at privacy from the neighbors in TN.

One of the paths through our woods in NH.  Such a huge and welcome contrast!

 

My biggest surprise about the outside of our new home was the amount of fruit bearing bushes that were already growing here naturally!  In Tennessee, I was struggling to get our blueberry, blackberry and raspberry bushes to bear fruit in the clay, fill dirt that the builder had used to slope the neighborhood.  Here I found two different varieties of blueberries and they were growing everywhere on our acreage with no help from any thing but nature.  I also found a huge batch of blackberries, some raspberries and tons of wild strawberries.  In addition to the fruits I have growing naturally, I also have maple trees, sweet fern, plantain, mullein and even some sumac.

Keira standing in one of our wild blueberry bushes.

Not more than six months after we moved to New Hampshhire was when I got the bug to add more edible, native plants to our property.  I purchased a two volume series of books called Edible Forest Gardens: Ecological Vision and Theory for Temperate Climate Permaculture.  I also joined NOFA-NH (Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire).  It just so happened that one of the authors of those books was going to be giving a presentation at their upcoming conference. 

My first goal was to start an organic garden and I have to say 2010 was definitely the year to do it!  For the first time ever, I had successfully planted and harvested several varieties of potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, pumpkins, watermelon, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, shallots and peppers with absolutely zero use of any chemical fertilizers or herbicides. At the NOFA-NH conference, I had learned so much from a local organic farmer that I even had great success growing corn organically.  In fact, it was the most low maintenance vegetable garden I have ever had and it was completely free of problems pests or diseases.  Why?  I didn't mess with the natural balance of things any more than I had to!  I'll write more about that in a future posting.

Corn already popping up on the left in the beginning of May 2010.  All four rows were full of stalks with three ears each by the end of the season!

One of our many potato harvests.

Two pumpkin plants that didn't stop growing!

In late 2009, I also started learning about herbs.  I had a casual interest in Tennessee and had planted some on our property but never really went beyond using poke root, red raspberry leaf and some mint.  Once I delved more into what medicinal plants were native and already growing on my property, I got sidetracked from developing a larger planting plan and decided to write a book first instead.  Now that my book, The Herbal Beverage Book, has been released, I am getting refocused back on my planting. 

I wanted to start this blog to chronicle how I am taking my yard from the state it’s in to a completely edible forest garden.   My vegetable garden and cultivated strawberry patches have been doing great since I started those two years ago and I have learned so much about soil fertility already.  By the time I am done I hope to have turned our acre or so of dirt and barely growing grass into a fertile and self-sustaining, permaculture.