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  • From: "Dori Green" <dorigreen00 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: market-farming Mulch and Pests and Other Stuff
  • Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 06:26:16 -0400


On my way out to the garden -- hoping that NWS is just late and not outright lying about their promise of rain. Blown knee is bending again, so I'm off to plant another couple hundred eggplants. But first, some coffee and contact!

I had great success with heavy hay mulch around potato plants, and the chicken I named "Dinner Bell" led the charge whenever I scouted too many beetles to tolerate -- pick her up and carry her over to the patch, turn her loose, she called the dinner bell for the rest of the free-range flock. They also kept slugs down. After rain I hand-pick the slugs from their sunning seats at the tops of plants and carry them over to the barn. Easy chemical-free bug control!

The problem with the heavy hay mulch was meadow voles. They carve runs at the base of heavy lawn or pasture, or through loose hay mulch. Almost every other potato had one tasting bite taken out of it. I haven't used hay mulch for potatoes again.

Yes, mulch increases soil life. This includes earthworms and other beneficial life as well as a few pests. I do cover my raised beds with a heavy winter mulch of leaves. In spring I just rake it over into the path, add some compost, sprinkle seeds, cover with more compost. Preparation of this system has taken years and most of the beds are in their first sod rotation this year -- a risky experiment with lots of weeds I'm not happy to see -- but there's also a heavy clover population, experiment success, in many places it's even crowded out the galansoga (now there's a magic trick). I'm now starting to solarize sections of the beds with clear plastic before applying mulch in preparation for next season's planting, and it's time to mow them all with the DR trimmer to arrest more weed seed production. Ideally this would be done with scythes but sigh I fear this year I'm going to cheat and use the DR. But so far this experiment in organic no-till has been working for me. The whole pictorial history will be up at my site by the end of next week.

Leaves make great mulch and are usually free of herbicides. If you arrange for delivery from a town, be sure to specify in writing that they have to be loose and not bagged -- or else have a LOT of committed volunteers or workers on hand to dump them immediately after arrival while they're dry and light and the plastic doesn't shatter because of UV exposure. Ugh, some of the things that live under those bags after they've sat for a year....which some of them will if it's only you doing all of the work and the town brings ten truckloads of bagged leaves despite your specification. Once out of the bags, they make great compost when layered with kitchen and restaurant scraps, goat and chicken and pony manure, some sawdust, wood ashes, and sprinklings from your old compost pile to innoculate the new one. I let each new pile sit for three years before using on the garden, just to make sure that any pesticides or herbicides have been well broken down if they come in by accident. When I'm able to rent a Bobcat or hire my neighbor with his front-end loader tractor for an hour or two, the pile gets turned -- otherwise it just sits. I also use it for training goats and ponies for plowing since it's low-resistance to the shovel plow and the uneven soft footing encourages the animals to slow down.

Side notes -- two goats with a yoke can easily pull a small shovel plow through a compost pile or well-worked garden soil, but they aren't up to rocks or rough new fields. For those I hire a tractor guy.

One willing pony with a shovel plow can do as much work as a full-sized draft horse, and the pony isn't as likely to step on seedlings already in place. There's also a small Amish-made cultivator available for goats or ponies, available from Hoegger's or Caprine Supply for less than $200. A breast strap harness can be used on a pony with a light plow or small cultivator; I'm still working to make the draft angle better for the shovel plow for the goat yoke.

And then it all comes down to the hand-planting of transplants. Today it's the eggplants and okra and more perimeter squashes. Then the tomatoes go onto red IRT mulch on the upper field. Yes, they're way late. Everything is way late this year. But the things that are in, are doing very well so I have hope.

Dori Green
Ash Grove Community Farm
Corning, NY

http://www.ic.org/agrove

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  • Re: market-farming Mulch and Pests and Other Stuff, Dori Green, 06/29/2001

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