Liberated Gardener

Free Burlap Mulch

Keeping a garden mulched can cost a lot in terms of time and materials. 

Organic mulches--bark, woodchips, shredded leaves, etc.--all decompose into their basic constituents, which are carbon dioxide and water. 

That decomposition is good for the soil microbes--and the soil microbes are good for the plants--but for the gardener it means an unending chore of replacing mulch before you're left with bare soil exposed to the baking sun and opportunistic weed seeds. And for some, it means frequent dunning of the bank account if you buy mulch. 

For our organic vegetable garden and our community garden in Burch Ave. neighborhood we scavenge old burlap sacks that once held coffee beans and use them to mulch the paths between beds.

 

It only takes a few minutes to spread several dozen bags to cover an area. I put them down with about 4" of overlap. After two or three months (depending on the season) a few of the toughest weeds (think nutsedge or bermuda grass) poke their heads through the weave of the bags. And a few annual weed seeds might germinate on top--like crabgrass in summer or chickweed in winter. 

But here's the fun part. Before the weeds can get very big or numerous (I like to do this before there's more than a couple of weeds on each bag), I go back through the garden and flip every bag over. 

Again, this only takes a few minutes and one of two bad things happen to the weeds:

1) The weed clings to the bag and its roots are ripped out of the ground. When I flip the bag the roots are exposed to the sun and the weed dies. This is usually the case with annual weeds that germinated on top and sent their roots down through the fabric of the bag. 

2) If the weed slips through the bag and remains rooted in the ground, it still loses. When I lay the bag back down, it covers the weed and deprives it of light.  A plant without light for 6-8 weeks will starve to death, since sunlight is food for plants.  

(Ideally, any tough perennial weeds like bermuda grass have been eliminated before you start gardening, but their seeds can float in on the wind too.)

  

 Counter Culture Coffee gives these bags away once they've dumped the beans into their roasters. You don't want to get coffee bags from any roaster--make sure they only use organic beans. One acquaintance picked up bags from her local coffee roaster and got home to find out the bags smelled like petroleum products. They probably had been sprayed with some nasty pesticide before being shipped to this country. She ended up tossing the whole lot. 

As for the ink to make the lovely logos on some bags, I think they must be water-based. An artist who uses coffee bags for her work says the ink rarely survives a run through the washer. So I don't think they'll hurt soil life or contaminate any food plants. 

Finally, because the burlap is also organic matter, after another 2 or 3 months the bags are deteriorating badly and need to be covered with another layer. But since they're free and take little time to spread, it's a small thing to put down  a new layer twice a year. 

And I can occasionally time my visits to the coffee roaster so I'm there for a free coffee tasting--or what they call a "coffee cupping" at 10 am on Fridays.

Now that's liberating. 

Contain Your Mulch

I'm always looking for ways to save time in the garden. 

And watering and weeding are two of the biggest demands on a gardener's time. 

If you spent less time on those two chores, it would leave more time for real gardening: cutting flowers, harvesting groceries, dividing plants that you want more of and kicking back and just looking around at your wonderful garden. 

Some garden writers advocate using containers as a way to reduce garden chores, but by adding pots and window boxes, you could actually increase the amount of time spent watering. Why? Because plants' roots dry out faster in a container--there's just so much less space available for storing water than in a big ol' garden. 

You could be watering containers every day or two during a summer heat wave. 

And weed seeds can fly on the wind to land in containers where they find the expensive potting soil you bought to be a very attractive spot to germinate, grow, flower and set seed--unless you snag 'em  and kick 'em to the curb before they get too big. 

I've got nothing against pots, but I do have something against unnecessary work. That's why I use mulch in all our containers and window boxes. The idea of mulching a garden bed to hold moisture and keep down weeds has become more common (tho too many beds go wanting). No reason not to adopt the same practice when it comes to containers. 

We even use mulch in containers for house plants. No reason not to save time there too. 

Here's a photo of a container I threw together one day for a downtown thrift store. They're no longer in business, but I hope someone is still enjoying this container made from a tire from a racing car, with a mulch of brick chips. 

 

Here's a container with a dwarf citrus tree mulched with Mexican beach pebbles. This kind of mulch is not cheap, but you get your money's worth here, as the pebbles are highly visible and you don't need large quantities. 

 

Here's another potted dwarf citrus tree with pebbles of a different color, that I've turned on edge for a different look.  I used to water my four citrus trees about once a week. With the mulches I now water them about every two weeks. 

  

And you can save your money by using whatever materials are plentiful to make a mulch. Here, Chris used the cups from acorns to mulch a potted pansy. Next spring I may use the oak flowers that clog the rain gutters as a mulch in containers. 

 

Don't get the wrong idea here, (okay, maybe you're getting the right idea) but I've used corks from wine bottles to mulch this ficus tree in our house. Yes, many of the corks are generated in-house, but most of them come from a restaurant that saves corks for me.

 Originally I had just been tossing them into the pot, but the helter-skelter look left something to be desired. I started standing them up for a more attractive look. I used to water this ficus once a week, but now that the potting soil is completely covered with a wine cork mulch, it gets watered about once a month. 

Your favorite restaurant will probably save corks for you if you come by to pick them up every-so-often. It's a shame for good organic material like corks to end up in the landfill. 

 

In other pots we've used more conventional mulches--pine bark, shredded hardwood bark, gravel, shredded tree leaves, cocoa husks, etc. The pine bark tends to float away when you water--which even if you're watering less often, the clean up adds to the work load, so we don't use that anymore, but the others are stable. And they do reduce the amount of watering and weeding.

And if chosen well, the mulch adds something visually attractive and can be cost effective. 

So get your containers mulched before summer really sets in and use the time you save for whatever your favorite gardening tasks might be. Or use the saved time to generate more cork mulch! 

 

Mulch

If you want to spend less time weeding and more time picking flowers and veggies, size up your options for mulching your plant beds. Except for early spring crops that need sun to warm the soil, every plant benefits from a mulch.

            Trees and shrubs will live longer without the competition from grass or the bark damage from weed-wackers. Smother the surrounding grass with a foundation mulch of overlapping sections of newspapers or sheets of cardboard—if you deny a plant light for 2 months, it will die. Then cover with pine bark, pine straw, wood chips or leaves. Put down the mulch about 3" deep--the mulch should cover the length of your middle finger if you're touching the soil. 

Don't let the mulch pile up on the stem or trunk--moist mulch invites pest and disease problems, so leave a little space.

            In the perennial bed a mulch keeps sunlight from reaching the soil to germinate weed seeds. Smaller particles make a better-looking mulch, so use ground pine bark mulch, seasoned sawdust or triple shredded hardwood bark mulch or my favorite--shredded tree leaves. 

Too thick a layer can cause disgusting root rots on hairy-leaved and succulent plants that tolerate dry conditions, so don’t let mulch pile up around the crowns of these plants.

            In the annual vegetable garden an insulating layer of mulch keeps the sun from steaming the moisture out of the soil and toasting the roots. 

As the mulch decomposes it becomes an organic food supply for the earthworms and microbes that make a soil rich and able to best support garden plants. 

I think the best season to apply mulch is winter--especially around January and February. It's cool enough to work hard and not break a sweat. And the bulbs and perennials are dormant, so they are not in the way, making it much easier and faster to spread the mulch. 

A Slate Roof Gets Grounded

Slate roofs can last about 100 years. But even so, a lot of people would rather tear them off and replace them with asphalt shingles that only last about 20 years. Why? Because they don't want to pay for the occasional repair on their slate roof. They aren't saving money and to my eye their house looks the worse for it--but hey, to each his own. 

Adding environmental insult to aesthetic injury, most of these slate shingles end up in municipal landfill. A truly sad end when you think of the labor that went into quarrying the slate, shaping it and installing it. 

With an eye for beautifying gardens and a feel for what it took to shape these stones, I've salvaged a fair share of intact slate roofing shingles and have put them to use in various gardens for edging beds, like this one below, which I installed about 10 years ago. 

 

They are sturdy and handsome, natural and salvaged. A perfect look for a liberated garden. 

Here's a larger view of the entire garden bed, originally created about 20 years earlier for a single Japanese maple tree. 

(I was brought in on this job because the maple was suffering from singed leaves and dying limbs. If you want to learn what the Liberated Gardener did to remedy this situation, check my blog tomorrow for that story. )
 

 

Installing the roofing slate as an edging is a very low tech activity. 

I used a square-point shovel (a spade or edger would do also) to create a vertical slit right slap next to the original brick edging--or concrete walkway--about 6-8" deep. The slates are only about a 1/4" thick, so I then lined up a slate on its side in line with the slit and pushed it down a bit into the opening by hand. Then I used a mallet (a dead-blow hammer would work too) to tap it in as deep as necessary so the exposed height would be about 4 inches or so; high enough to hold a 2-3" layer of mulch in place. 

I then set the next slate into the slit, while butting its end up against the first slate. Tapped it down till the top was level with the first one and then installed the third one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Generally roofing slates are about 10" across. So if you can create a slit at least 6" deep with the shovel, you'll be okay. 

If the slates are wider than you can push down into the soil, decide how much you want to remove, stack a few of them, mark the top one and cut through them all with an old circular saw and a new masonry blade. 

I say an old circular saw, because the dust from cutting stone will get into the saw and eat the bearings until it quits working. But once you've bought a masonry blade (better yet a longer-lasting industrial diamond blade for about $20) and you see how easy it is to cut stone--and brick--you'll probably want to dedicate that saw to these kind of projects. (And set up a fan to blow the dust away from you.)

And once you've installed your lovely, salvaged edging--so much prettier and longer lasting than any of the plastic crap made from fossil fuels, and cheaper than steel edging, which rusts and looks neglected--you can plant some candytuft or oregano to gently grow over the edging for that relaxed cottage garden look.

And then relax yourself in a shady chair with a view of your permanent slate-edged bed. 

 

Spring Garden Tips

A few things to help get spring good and rolling:

* If you didn't spread mulch over the winter, get it done now before the summer heat sweeps you indoors. A layer of organic mulch--shredded leaves, shredded bark--keeps the sun from drying out the soil, reduces the number of weeds, provides food for earthworms, provides nutrients for plants and just looks better. From the mid-Atlantic south, about 2"-3" will last a year or so. If you get a late start, only apply about an inch, that way you can apply some more this winter and get on a better schedule. 

* If you have new plantings, put a soaker hose around them (see earlier post about soaker hoses), cover the soaker hose and bed with mulch, connect the soaker to a garden hose, connect the garden hose to a timer and connect the timer to your spigot. Then when you go to work you can cut on the timer/spigot and go to work knowing that the water will turn itself off and your plants won''t be toasted during a heat wave. 

* If you haven't applied lime to your fescue lawn, you can do so now. Really you can do so anytime. It takes about 6 months for the lime to have any effect. 

* Pull weeds before they can set seed. Keeping the number of weed seeds down will reduce your weed population over time. 

* Even if you don't eat them, plant dill and fennel. Their wide clusters of tiny flowers will attract tiny wasps that don't sting people and lay eggs that attack garden pests, like tomato hornworms. 

* From the mid-Atlantic south, even if you planted in April, there are still vegetable crops that can be planted in May and June: sweet potatoes, okra, watermelons, pumpkins, corn, new potatoes, cucumbers and winter squash as well as any mid spring crops that had setbacks, such as tomatoes, peppers, etc. It's a long enough season for late spring/early summer plantings to do well. 

* If any leaves show signs of disease--early blight on tomatoes, rust on iris, for example--pull those leaves and throw them away. Any rain or overhead irrigation that hits those leaves will splash the disease onto other leaves on other plants. 

* Any perennials that grew too tall and flopped over last summer can be cut back hard now. That will force them to grow more stems that are shorter and more stable. 

* Deadhead flowers that seed in more than you like or just to keep them from putting energy into seed production at  the expense of next year's flowers.