SOLVING Most Difficult Garden Task for How to start a KITCHEN vegetable garden 101 for beginners MULCH Series, Not straw mulch but erosion control blanket.
Mutual 17687 Single Net Excelsior Blanket, 101-1/4′ Length x 4′ Width This is the product I bought. Just copy and paste and add in to you search bar where you can buy it… THANKS
Thanks Mark. For those of us who cannot afford erosion mating, dont forget cardboard, black plastic and tarps.
Really look forward to seeing how this works – hopefully well.
My idea for growing with bad soil:
Year 1: potatoes, sunchokes, groundnut (Apios americana), thick mulch
Year 2: mostly asparagus
awesome Mark! we finally got a decent rain in Eastern Iowa. I thank you again for your videos.
Dumpster-dive for cardboard and place it between rows. Hold it down with landscaper's weed-block staples, alA few layers will last all growing season. Thank you , Mark
Zone 7a here, just north of Philadelphia. It has been a miserable spring, too much rain and cool. I've got most of my planting done but nothing seems to be growing very much. I'm noticing a slight bit of yellowing on some of the plants, I assume from too much rain. We need some sun and heat.
Great idea. Give us updates on your seeds planted in chips plus the dirt mixed with wood chips and the nitrogen test.
That's really cool, but the netting to me seems to be extra work. It would be nice if the netting itself was biodegradable.
I do see it's usefulness when you don't have anything else
Sry but this defeats the purpose especially for those who insist on being frugal and not just head to the local farmers market
Looks clean and neat. My only concern is with the netting. It may become brittle by the summer and be difficult to remove. Also we used a similar netting, with smaller holes, around our chicken pen and snakes are constantly getting tangled up in it.
Like you mentioned, what two years ago? Rolling this right over some nice THICK clover could be really amazing!
We tried Ruth Stout (deep straw) and also wood chips over the past couple of years. We're in zone 5b, and have a very wet climate and are on a north slope where the soil is cooler until mid summer so we had results similar to your initial back to eden experiments (drowned roots and stunted plants). The Ruth Stout garden was like a slug farm and it also kept the soil too moist when the straw was too deep. We adjusted based on our observations and quite a bit of the info in your videos. Abandoning the deep hay meant lots of grass this season–trying to replace that piecemeal with cover crops. Cover crops and fall leaves and raised beds seem to be the best combo for our conditions. I appreciate your approach to these videos. I feel like too many youtube gardening channels do a hard sell on whatever method they're proposing as a cure all, panacea, when the reality is you need to experiment to adapt any technique to your unique conditions.
$50 for that much material is not bad. It will be a pain working around that nylon net but good idea anyway.
This looks so very neat. Do you think with the netting that it would be a deterrent to cats using the garden as their litter box?
We live in eastern Colorado. Zone 5d-6a. This year it’s good there are grocery stores! Our weather went from snow to 105f in four weeks. A biblical plague of grasshoppers moved in and it looks like the surface of the moon now. Trying again with row covers.
Just for clarification, is this fiber to plant in to OR plant along the edges and use it as a walk way?
Also sold at HDepot and Lowes
Thanks for sharing! Glad to see you're starting to show yourself more in the videos. I also live in zone 6B but in Northern West Virginia and our weather has been extremely hot and wet. We lost all of our spring plants early from the Heat
That's my system complete with roll of craft paper. I use a round bale of hay instead of excelsior, but functionally the same! I invented it!
Netting not friendly ok product, another idea for some is using all cotton sheets clothes etc from charity shop's that throw out what they can't use and they will compost. Yes I know some of it might have nasty washing chemicals. But does work. Jeans can be hung and filled with compost and planted with hanging tomatoes, strawberries, peas etc.
Well done for sharing so much information. It's appreciated!
Just watched 3 of your great videos where you open it coming out of the big barn….nice touch by the way…but I didn't recognize you from earlier videos.
Yours is one of my favorite 'go-to' gardening sites. Your scientific approach is so much appreciated.
Thanks
Mark:
When I first started gardening using a covering I was using news papers under my wood chips and even though I had a good fungi growth in my soil the news papers were not breaking down even after three years, I was able to uncover and pull up large sections of news paper.
When using the news paper, the weeds that did come up were very hard to pull.
I stopped using news papers and just put down straw or old hay and wood chips, bark and sawdust from my firewood mess when I do my cleanup in the spring. The weeds I choose to pull up pull very nice with this covering.
I have found I can increase my fungal grown much faster with the saw dust produced from cutting my firewood. I have noticed a few different types of fungus in my gardens.
I do not know the different types but some are white, some are pink, other are purple and even a light brown.
They are like mass spider webs in the soil.
I have noticed when I remove sod and put it in my compost bins to break it down a tan colored fungus will grow on the top of the drying sod. At first glance it looks foamy and almost like a dog barfed something up. 🙂
This year I had my first mushrooms come up in the garden. Don't know what kind but was pleased to see yet another form of fungus in the garden.
The first year planting corn in my garden with a 3 inch covering of wood chips, the corn had produced a mass amount of roots and was not tipped over by the high winds we get from time to time. Before I started using a covering my corn would get tipped over at least twice and have very little root structure. The corn grown with the covering had so many roots in every directing as well as very large tap roots that the stalks were nearly impossible to pull up.
I have had a few volunteer buckthorn trees come up in my garden bed that was not in use for a couple years and when I pulled them up (with a fight) the root structure of a 12 inch tree was around 3 feet in diameter, not including all the hair like roots.
Question: What are your thoughts on using a broadfork in the garden? I started using one this year to prepare new beds, to remove the sod in areas I wanted to plant out this spring rather than put a heavy covering of straw and wood chips and wait to plant till next spring. The reason I am removing the sod it due to the mass amount of quack grass in some areas of my yard.
Once the quack grass comes back into the new beds if forms a root structure at the surface of the soil just below the covering making it possible to pull the entire root from the garden bed leaving none behind.
Other weeds like thistle I tend to cut back and leave the roots to break down in the soil, due to their large and deep root system. Dandelion is my favorite "weed" in the garden. The bees love them and dandelion seems to restore my soil much quicker than other "weeds".
There are only a few weeds I make it a point to get rid of and spotted nap weed is one of them. One year I pulled enough spotted nap weed to fill a contractors size wheel barrel mounded up twice from roughly a 1000 foot square area.
I use a varieties of mulch; leaves, woodchips, grass clippings, seaweed etc. anything that's organic. Then to prevent weed growth while I'm not using a space of the garden, I cover the soil with lengths of a good quality woven weed mat. It keeps the garden clean, and the microbes happy. Then when I'm ready to use the garden space, I roll back the weed mat and plant as usual. It stops mulch from flying all over the place as well.
Mark, Now that it's been several months could you give a short word or review about how effective this method was for your kitchen garden area? Pros and cons? Will you do this again, or did you think of a better option? Thanks, Diana
Mark, do u have asparagus bed??
You are a good teacher. It's in the heart.
Can you add a comment with this info about how this held up over the summer and winter? Thanks! And love the photo bomb by your dog! Sweet looking animal.
a new subber thanks for all your videos and info, i have to be honest lots of new things to me. i will be wtching all your videos to see what i can learn but do have a question up front.
mulch- you see i am an American in the Philippines trying retired but trying to start something here grow our own as well as perhaps make a little money some day for wife and young kids.
i want to try to use your knowledge if i understand all well .
i am planting hundreds well into the thousands of moringa tree right now. my understanding is it is nitrogen fixing and hope i can plant a few climbing type of plants next to them , want to do the mulch thing but i do not have acess to much of what you talk about. some day when i can afford to import a chipper i can do wood chips but for now about all i have that is cheap would be raw coco peat or coco limber saw dust maybe rice husk but that is getting more expensive now and so light will blow away i think pretty fast
my thought was to put down some vermicast then cardboard then say the coco peat does that sound like it would work??
Hello Mark I want to thank you again for all this amazing and useful information on all of your videos.
I would like to ask if you can please do a video explaining in detail when weeds are good and when they are bad and why
What they do to the soil or the plants
Thanks again….
All the best.
You're an amazing teacher.