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  • From: road's end farm <organic101 AT linkny.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Market-farming] Mulch
  • Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2007 23:19:53 -0500


On Dec 6, 2007, at 2:14 PM, Jan Lite wrote:

>I'd like to try putting down mulch over my garden to reduce weeds and help
>the soil.  It's about 3 acres, but I'm really not sure how to get it done.
>Also not sure how to plant a garden on it.

I like the suggestion about growing your own mulch.
Any chance of a cover crop such as a cereal rye/legume mixture?

When that's whacked down, you'll have biomass galore - not only above ground to supress weeds but the extensive rye roots will add alot of OM below, plus N from the legume. Plant right into the mulch.
NC State had a great success with a recent no-till cucurbit trial.

They almost certainly used herbicide.

Rye/legume mulch is great, but it will only suppress weeds temporarily. The weeds will come up through it with huge enthusiasm several weeks later (fueled by the N from the legume). Be prepared to either use herbicide; do a great deal of weeding; or cultivate at that point, tilling in the cover crop in the process (I do the last of these, as well as some hand weeding).

I lost a winter squash crop, through not knowing this, and listening to huge enthusiasm on the part of people in New Jersey who kept talking about "heavy weed suppressant mulch" and neglecting to mention, in most of their descriptions of the system, the herbicide they used to control the later weed flush. By the time the problem became obvious, the squash was running, and it was too late to till; but the squash then disappeared entirely in the rampant weed growth, and produced almost nothing.

If you have almost no weed pressure, you might not have much of this effect. But if you have any weed seed bank in the soil, look out.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale



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