The garden is progressing along nicely. So far the only things we've harvested have been a few tiny radishes and a couple green onions, but it won't be long now until we will have more produce than we can keep up with.
Last year was our first year of mulching our garden. Previous to that we had always just tilled between the rows every couple of weeks, and tried to keep ahead of the weeds. After reading about some of the benefits of mulching rather than constant tilling I decided I wanted to try it.
We bought straw bales and spread them thickly over the garden. I was amazed that we hardly had to water last year. Our garden has somewhat sandy soil, and watering is a huge chore, but with the mulch keeping the moisture in we had very little need to water. The only down side to the straw mulch was that apparently there were some weed seeds in the straw, and so we had an abundant crop of weeds about halfway to harvest.
This year my husband has a lawn mower with a bagger, and we decided to use grass clippings for our mulch. I'm hoping to continue adding to them all year until I have a mulch depth of about 7-8 inches. Mulching with grass is a little harder than straw because it's green and heavy when we put it on the garden, but so far I've been pleased with it.
I'm open to advice about mulching. It's a fairly new idea for me and I would love to hear from some of you who have been doing it for a long time.
Now check out how Connie's garden is doing.
Hi! I'm visiting from Connie's gardening post. Your garden looks nice! My mom mulched with grass clippings and it works great. There are a couple things that don't like mulch, though. I know green beans is one, and maybe tomatoes. I think tomatoes can get a blight from being mulched? You can mulch around the outside of the plant, just don't do directly underneath. I wish we had GRASS to mulch with :) Our yard is very poor is just weed stuff. So for now we just till and pull weeds :)
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