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. 

Even the Weeds in Provence are Better Than Ours!

We probably wouldn't complain about weeds so much if they looked like these poppies:

 

...or this stand of borage:

 
 

or this unidentified weed:

 

all of these flowers were at the train station where our first farm family picked us up near the Mediterranean, east of Marseille and Toulon. 

On that farm, the main house is surrounded by trees I haven't identified yet, but the understory trees are mature bay trees (Laurus nobilis) (our little cottage at home is named Bayleaf Cottage and we have killed bays 3 times before getting one established.)

And the ground is covered with acanthus and spiraea growing wild. 

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.