What’s the Best Mulch? If done correctly, most fruit and vegetable plants are their own best mulch during the growing season—spaced perfectly for plants to not only have plenty of room to meet their full potential but also shade and protect the soil with their barely-touching foilage. As an additional Read more…
Adjusting Mulch Timing and Thickness to Create Perfect Soil Microclimates Using the suggestions for cool- and warm-season plants as a starting point, gardeners can also make adjustments to fit each crop based on your current and predicted soil moisture and weather. Depending on the crop and time of the year, Read more…
Mulching Cool- and Warm-Season Plants Different plants prefer different growing conditions. In general, cool-season plants like cool and quite moist soil, and warm-season plants like warmer and, often, a little drier soil. Mulch each accordingly, taking into account the soil temperature and soil moisture at each time of the season Read more…
Mulch: The Powerhouse of Conserving Soil Moisture Giving your plants the right amount of water and watering regularly are not the same thing—at least they don’t have to be. Your plants having the right amount of water simply means that the soil stays evenly moist. The easiest way to keep Read more…
Mulching for the Season During the Growing Season: Temperature and Moisture During the growing season, then, think of mulch as a moisture and temperature regulator for your soil. Use it to regulate your soil’s moisture and temperature like you use the thickness or absence of a raincoat or winter jacket Read more…
My Own Mulch Epiphanies I’ve known about the power of mulch my entire life, perhaps more than I wanted to in my early years. When I was growing up, my siblings and I spent countless hours shoveling and spreading sawdust, straw, wood chips, and the like around thousands of blueberry Read more…
What Are Cover Crops? Cover crops are crops like wheat, oats, rye, forage radishes, clovers, and vetches that are grown to blanket, or cover, and protect the soil when the soil would otherwise be bare during the garden’s offseason, between widely spaced food crops, between temporal gaps in food crops. Read more…
What Are Cover Crops? Cover crops are crops like wheat, oats, rye, forage radishes, clovers, and vetches that are grown to blanket, or cover, and protect the soil when the soil would otherwise be bare during the garden’s offseason, between widely spaced food crops, between temporal gaps in food crops. Read more…
Clearing Existing Vegetation for “No-Dig”/”No-Till” Beds Just like for tilling and digging methods, the first step in making a “no-dig” or “no-till” bed is to decide how you want to clear the area you intend as a bed of its existing vegetation. If the site has persistent weeds with strong Read more…
“No-Dig”/”No-Till”: Adding 6″ of Cured Compost Gardeners have been planting in compost heaped on top of the soil for at least as long as people have recorded such things. French Intensive gardeners were planting in 18 inches of cured horse manure placed on top of the existing soil going at Read more…