Why I Never (Well, Hardly Ever) Buy Mulch

Over the last twenty-five years a tide of mulch--some shredded, some chipped, some brown, some bright orange--has spread over America.  It makes the landscaping in people's gardens, around the parking lots of malls, and in front of filling stations look calm and controlled, like a room after the bed has been made.

I have bought mulch in my time--heavy, cumbersome bags of it--though never as much as I needed to achieve that well-bedded look.  Every spring, if I were dedicated to that look or if my house were within sight of critical suburban eyes,  I would buy another dozen bags to supplement the dwindling original layers of the stuff. 

But I don't.  Instead, I combine spring clean-up and mulching into a single effort. 

First I go around the garden collecting the dried-out remnants of last summer's plants:  the baptisia branches, the peony stems, the dried sedums, and the six-foot stalks of what is either a small sunflower or a Jerusalem artichoke.  I gather armfuls of the stuff and, instead of carting it into the woods, I pile it thickly along the back of the flower beds, having first pushed the remnants of the store-bought mulch to the front.  Then I stomp on the piles to break them up and so the wind won't blow them away.

This home-grown mulch is dun-colored and, at least to my countrified eyes, fairly innocuous.  It saves me not only money and gas but many trips into the woods, which is a good thing in this busy season.  And in a couple of weeks, when the baptisia and the peonies and the giant hostas and the pachysandra and the columbines all explode, you won't be able to see my home-grown mulch unless you look really, really closely. 

Fortunately my gardening friends and I, by unspoken compact, only look closely at what is admirable--that hardy lavender!  that budding rose bush!  Our friendship-trained eyes barely register the sprouting bishop's weed, the un-harvested dandelions, and that stack of old stalks laid on the ground at the back of the flower bed. 

Blinking away the undesirables, we look each other in the face and declare that what with the crazy weather, and the absence of bees, and those horrible invasive species this is the most challenging, impossible gardening year ever, and it will be a miracle if we can get a single plant to survive until the October frosts arrive.

Mulch Hay

Got six bales of mulch hay today, a kind of vegetable duvet that I plan to apportion to various living beings around here, i to make their winter more comfortable.

A couple of bales will go around the feet of the climbing roses I planted last summer against the chicken-shed wall.  Climbing roses are supposed to be tough.  But this will be my roses' first winter, and their name, "New Dawn," makes them sound so young and fragile that I'm going to give them a nice thick mulch this year.

I will also mulch the seven lavender bushes growing against the stone wall in front of the house.  Not only did they survive last winter, but they produced an amazing crop of blossoms right through the middle of November.  Some of their flowers, which I picked and dried in early summer, are now inside the scented "eye pillow" that helps me go to sleep at night.
  
I believe that the lavender's survival was due not only to the warmth of the sun that the stone wall captured and retained, but to the excellent snow cover we got last winter.  Unfortunately, since  thanks to global warming, even in Vermont we can't count on heavy snows,  my lavender bushes will need hay to protect them if the snow is scarce.

Most of the hay, however, will go to the chickens.  Now that the goats are gone, my six hens have almost 130 square feet of coop space.  While that guarantees against the evils of overcrowding--hysteria, depression, and cannibalism--six birds hardly generate enough heat to warm up that much space.

The answer is a nice, deep, dry, crunchy bed of hay.  Something they can scratch around in, peck at, poop on.  Something to keep their skinny chicken feet away from that freezing-cold plywood floor.  Something to spread on the garden next spring.

And something to keep me, as I snuggle under my duvet at night, from fretting about my six girls while the wind howls outside.

Vegetable Morals

As you know if you've been reading along, last fall I attempted to soften the severe Yankee looks of our house by making a flower bed.

Our front porch rises about 2 ½ feet above the ground. Right where the foundation meets the dirt there was a scraggly old row of tiger lilies that had been invaded by Bishop's Weed. The orange blooms didn't look very good against the barn red of the siding, and I knew I didn't stand a chance of getting rid of the Bishop's Weed as long as it could grow into and around the lilies, so I decided to euthanize the lot.

In November, I razed the lilies to the ground, covered them in black plastic, and threw some mulch on top. By March, I felt pretty certain that the snow and ice and lack of light had done their deadly task. Just to make sure, however, I bought a truckload of “mulch hay,” the stuff that farmers sell cheaply because it is too old or moldy to feed to animals.

When you cut the strings that hold a hay bale together, it comes apart in neat accordion-like flakes, each about three inches thick. I covered the area where the tiger lilies and Bishop's Weed had last been seen with a three-flake layer of hay that reached a third of the way to the floor of the porch. Then I stomped everything down to make a deadly thick barrier against light and air.

A few days later, I was checking the hydrangeas for signs that they had survived the winter when I noticed something funny. The mulch I had put over the tiger lilies had risen like a loaf of bread, and was now even with the floor of the porch.

I went to investigate, and heard a crunching sound as I walked on top of the hay. I parted a couple of flakes and saw that the yeast that had caused the rise was none other than the tiger lilies which, undeterred by plastic, mulch, and hay, had heard the call of spring and were doing their best to reach the sun.

The leaves that were pushing their way under the hay were pale but turgid. I attempted to pull them up but the best I could do was twist and mangle them and break off the tops. My hands were wet with sap, and as I dug around under the hay I found the inevitable Bishop's Weed, waiting for the merest drop of sunshine to rise up and take over the flower bed, if not the world.

I must say I feel abashed by such drive, such joie de vivre among these ordinary plants. Shouldn't this kind of optimism and self confidence be rewarded somehow?

It should, but in me, not in weeds. I will continue to pull up every shoot of tiger lily and Bishop's Weed I find, while reminding myself to emulate the moral qualities of my vegetable enemies.

The Apotheosis Of Ruth Stout, The Mother Of Mulching

The Joy Of Mulching

We filled our pickup truck with mulch hay today, and my spirits are soaring. Mulch, despite its icky name, always does that to me. Especially mulch hay.

For one thing, when the weather is cold and the world has turned to mud and it's too early to work outside even though you're dying to, you can always mulch.

I don't mulch the vegetable garden. Since I plant intensively, the vegetables grow close enough to each other to keep weeds in the dark (this is technically known as “shade mulch').

What I love to mulch is problem areas—those in-between places, neither lawn nor flower bed, that look scraggly and weedy and unkempt. The one I'm thinking about right now is a spot around a big lilac bush at the back of the house.

You know how lilacs are. Every spring they sprout new shoots out of the ground. These are woody and hardy and you can't pull them up. All you can do is cut them as far down as possible. But the worst part is that amidst these trunks and shoots all sorts of opportunistic weeds take root, and spread from there to infinity. In the case of this one lilac the weed is a low-growing ivy-type thing, with round scalloped leaves and tiny blue flowers. It smells foul when you yank it out. This is the spot I have selected for this spring's mulching offensive.

First, I will pull out as much of the bad stuff as I can. Then I will gather up a year's worth of New Yorkers and spread them over the ground, trying my best not to get distracted by a 40-page article about orchestra conductors. I will supplement the magazines with old newspapers, cardboard boxes and such. When not a square inch of dirt is visible, I will fetch a bale of hay, cut off the strings, separate it into “slabs” and lay them over the reading matter, until not a single printed word can be seen.

By the time I'm finished, my mulch cake will be a good eight inches tall. And nothing will grow through it. Not this year, anyway. Next year, I'll just add more mulch.

When everything is looking neat and cozy under its comforter of hay, I will retire indoors to meditate on what I want to plant in that spot. When I have decided—I'm thinking about spearmint, since the spot is shady—I will simply move the hay aside, cut holes in the magazines beneath, bung my little plants in, and tuck the hay around their feet.

I do use black plastic for mulch, but only in no-holds-barred (well, herbicides are barred) battles against certain fiends, such as Bishop's Weed. (I am girding my loins to write a post about Bishop's Weed.) Unlike The New Yorker, black plastic doesn't gracefully disintegrate after a season or two, and when I put it down I don't get that satisfying feeling that I'm making use of something that I would otherwise have to take to the dump. Moreover, when pieces of the plastic get uncovered—by snow-plows, dogs or goats—they flap in the breeze looking like flags of doom.

However, black plastic works. It helped me kill an entire garden that had been overrun by Bishop's Weed. I'm hoping it will kill the Bishop's Weed that is creeping into the flower beds in front of the house. Desperate times, and all that.

Ruth Stout was the Mulch Goddess during the years when I was learning to garden. She was bold, eccentric and outspoken, and had a full head of electrified-looking white hair. She was a Quaker and told the truth as she saw it. She lived into her nineties, and I honor her memory.

You can read about her here: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2004-02-01/Ruth-Stouts-System.aspx