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  • From: Rob <becida AT comcast.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] tvo post 2 May 2000, mulch
  • Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 18:59:31 -0700

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Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 11:45:17 -0400
From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT roanoke.infi.net>
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To: "Homestead mailing list" <homestead AT listserv.unc.edu>
Subject: Mulch
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Pat Meadows wrote:

> >
> When/if my husband and I are able to buy a house (rather
> than renting an apartment as we now are), I will face this
> problem.
>
> I'm 56 now, I'll want a productive garden RIGHT AWAY! I
> say this because of the oft-seen advice to gradually improve
> your soil with organic matter, year by year. Yes. Fine.
> I've done that in the past and I'll do it again, but I'll
> also want a productive garden from the first year.
>
> I'm planning to put in raised beds, and fill them with
> (purchased) topsoil (unless topsoil is an awful lot more
> expensive than I realize). I'll happily spend a couple of
> hundred dollars, if need be. Does this sound as if it would
> work? Other suggestions?
>
> Both my husband and I have back problems, I'll be very
> short on available physical labor. That's one reason I
> think the raised beds are the way to go. Advice on this?
>
> Pat
>
> Tvoivozhd---On the matter of free mulch. Almost every community I
know of
> gathers up Christmas trees, lawn clippings, brushpiles at curbside,
runs them
> through a chipper at a central location and gives the chips to anyone
who will
> haul them away. Not everything is taken, and that is hauled by the
ciity off
> to a landfill---a terrible waste.

You will want to avoid the lawn clippings unless you have a taste for malathion and diazinon, but the leaves and Christmas tree chips poison content will be immensely less---probably none from Christmas trees..

Also find out from the County road crews where and when they clean out the drainage ditches each side of rural roads (not lead-laden main highways) and when they (or the tree-contractors they hire) schedule cutting and chipping roadside brush. They, or the tree-contractors are delighted to be able to dump their loads in your front yard if it saves them a forty mile haul to a disposal site. A major ice storm or hurricane is generally a bonanza---electric company and telephone company repair crews working around the clock to clear up storm debris and restore service. Just be sure you get chips from roadsides that are not treated with brushkiller.

On more thing---if you live in a hilly area, from late fall through April, anywhere along rural roads, you will see hundreds of tons of leaves in the drainage ditches each side of the road. Every time it rains, they wash down out of the woods, off hillsides into those same drainage ditches, concentrated by water currents for your convenience. It helps to have a pickup truck or small two-wheel trailer, and a small leaf shredder with a vacuum hose attachment to suck up the leaves. Look for one to which you can tie a big plastic 40 gallon or so leaf bag. Punch some holes in it to let out the blast of air from the shredder-impeller.

You can simply rake up the leaves and hand-stuff them in the leaf bags, but the leaf shredders are a lot faster and reduce the volume by two thirds or more. My preference would be these rural leaves. Except where they use herbicides on roadside brush, they, like rural-raised Christmas tree chips, will be poison-free.

Also, at the cost of a chipper-shredder (more than a leaf-shredder, but not necessarily new), there are tons of cardboard boxes in apartment, office building dumpsters, behind small stores and shopping malls just waiting to become worm-food in your garden. If your soil is impenetrable clay, visit some construction sites and add their discarded gypsum-and-paper-and-glue sheetrock scraps to your compost heap or garden-mulch.

On the matter of raised-beds. This is usually interpreted as beds raised one level by rocks, old railroad ties etc. I don't really want to work at ankle-height anymore, and eight inches higher is an improvement, but not enough for me. So this year I put in some new strawberry pyramids (round, though). CT Farm and Country have been selling the heavy-duty Professional plastic lawn edging (six inches by twenty feet). for $2.99 (twice that at Home Depot and Lowes). Three rolls will make a four-ring pyramid. Cut the edging with a pruner to make the appropriate diameter ring when the ends are lapped a foot. Drill through the lapped ends and thread something like electric fence wire back and forth through the holes. One-inch by 1/4 bolts with washers would do as well and, unless the wire is aluminum, will last longer. I made the first ring about six feet diameter, and stepped each succeeding ring back eight or ten inches---it's not critical. If it had not been threatening rain and I was in a hurry, I would have shrunk the spacing between rings and gone higher. Three-inch spacing is plenty.

If you are not in such a hurry, it would be a good idea (extend the season) by cutting a one and one-half or two inch plastic pipe to the height of your intended pyramide, plus four feet (cut off any excess later) Put a threaded cap on top and bottom, the bottom one containing a half inch elbow threaded one end and hose-barb at the other---this is your irrigation supply (a clamped-on half-inch polyethylene flexible tubing).

At each level of your mound, drill and imbed a hose-barb to receive irrigation laterals. My preference is "Irrigro" because it is so resistant to clogging (do put a filter in your water supply line, though) http://www.irrigro.com/

Irrigro is a "leaky" tubing made from Tyvek; and will probably last longer than you will. You attach one end of each lateral to its hose barb on the vertical central pipe, and lead the other end through a drilled hole in your plastic edging. There it has a plug, removable if it is ever necessary to flush out the laterals.

Irrigro will withstand high pressures, but operates at about five pounds. High pressure clogs drippers and porous hose alike, imbeds debris in the pores. Low pressure lets water seep through---the reason I prefer porous hose to dripper hose. It also makes it easy to fertilze through the water supply. Put a fifty-five gallon barrel about 11.5 feet above the garden to be irrigated (gravity pressure equals .433 per foot of water-column height). Install a water filter in the outlet line, and a control valve inside the barrel---toilet-type float valve or a Hudson pressure valve from an agricultural supply house (used for stock water-tanks). Drop a gunnysack full of cow manure in the tank---presto, manure tea!

Back to the one and one-half or two inch plastic pipe. This is going to stand vertically in the center of the mound. In addition to easy irrigation and fertilization, you can imbed metal or plastic vertical pipe-sections vertically arount the outside perimeter of the first level, into which half-inch PVC pipes are inserted, the upper ends of which are bent to form an umbrella structure imbedded and glued into a short piece of PVC pipe.

Cover the umbrella with translucent plastic sheet for a miniature greenhouse and bird-repellant---replace annuallly for cheap sheet, every five years for

expensive greenhouse fabric. One layer will extend your strawberry season a month or more (with day-neutral Tribute), two layers (a flexible-strip between fastened to the umbrella ribs) will have you picking strawberries well into December or January. You will have to make access doors for picking, and vent doors to vent excess heat, or combinations thereof, with tightly sealing gaskets at the edges.

An afterthought---"good" topsoil is hard to come by at any price. I'd want to see where it came from. What is generally sold for good topsoil isn't. Most general contractors save their topsoil for landscaping after construction is complete.




  • [Homestead] tvo post 2 May 2000, mulch, Rob, 07/02/2005

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