Mulch Can Cover A Multitude of Sins As Well As Weeds

From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

Sometimes I think that Ruth Stout, the Queen of Mulch in the early days of organic gardening, did more to hurt the practice than to help it. She made it sound so easy and carefree. That’s okay because I daresay she persuaded more people to start gardening than any other single writer at that time. We all rushed out to gather up leaves and grass clippings from the four winds to pile on our gardens and then, tra la la, fell back in our hammocks and waited for harvest. Ruth put gardening on Easy Street.

As the old song puts in, “it ain’t necessarily so,”  as we all found out. Mulching is one of the very best gardening practices, but like everything else, you have to master the details if you are hoping for quality time in the hammock.

The rule of timing: The sin that mulching so often covers, in addition to weeds, is cold wet soil from applying the stuff too early. Do not start mulching until the soil has warmed up completely. I suppose on pure sand or in the deep South, this rule is not as critical, but whatever, especially on clay and loam soils, you will experience much grief if you layer on the mulch early in spring or worse, put it on late in fall or through the winter under the mistaken notion that you are protecting the soil from winter’s cold. The soil benefits from winter’s cold.

Mulching too early means you can’t work up a nice seedbed until late in the spring.  Transplants set into cold, mulched soil will sit there, blue and shivering, until July. I am talking now about organic mulches— hay, leaves, straw, grass clippings etc. Black plastic “mulch” can be put on early, and it will help warm the soil up. But that’s a subject for another time.

Here in northern Ohio, (you can make your own determinations accordingly), we do not put on organic mulches until June and then aren’t in a hurry. Right after a good rain is the best time, so as to prevent that moisture from evaporating into the air. Mulching in a normal year can take the place of watering. In a dry year, it can cut watering by half.

First we mulch early vegetables, perhaps even a little before June, especially leafy vegetables so that rain doesn’t bounce mud on them. Then comes the twin pole bean rows where the vines are climbing wooden poles anchored to a center wire overhead. That means a sort of tunnel underneath, impossible to get to with the tiller and hard even to hoe. Then we do potatoes before the plants fall and flounce all over.  After that we do the viney melons, squashes, sweet potatoes, etc. before the plants crawl out all over the place and make mulching difficult. Last comes tomatoes, eggplants and peppers which especially need to be growing vigorously in warm soil before mulching. Do not mulch onions up close. The bulbs need air and sunlight to grow properly. I usually do not mulch the sweet corn either since it is easy to cultivate weeds between the rows with the tiller.

Exceptions to the rule of timing: I put leaf mulch on the asparagus row as soon as possible after the first spears appear. That will be early, the last week of April here, but obviously the soil is warm enough or the shoots wouldn’t be coming up. Asparagus spears will come right up through the mulch but delay weeds. Then in June, on hands and knees, I crawl along the bed and manually turn over that leaf mulch, at the same time pulling out weeds, especially the zillions of little asparagus seedlings that have started to grow despite the mulch.

I mulch the raspberry patch heavily as soon as the raspberry leaves start coming out. I just throw leaf mulch with a fork over the patch and let them fall helter-skelter among the canes. New canes will come up right through a leaf mulch but most weeds won’t, at least for a month or so.

In a northern climate like ours, strawberries should be mulched in winter after the ground has frozen. Wheat or oat straw is the preferred mulch (rich in potassium). This mulch keeps the ground from thawing and freezing repeatedly over winter, which will heave strawberry plants out of the ground. Winter mulch also delays spring growth, therefore spring blossoming, therefore fewer frost-killed blossoms. Also, mulch protects the berry plants from deer which often take a craving for the first growth in spring. After the plants are pushing hard to get up through the mulch, pull the straw back to the edges of the strawberry bed where it will keep the subsequent berries clean and row middles relatively free of weeds.

Depth of mulch: As a general rule four inches is about right. Fluffier materials can go on thicker but you don’t want more mulch than will decompose over winter. If you grind up the leaves or other mulches as with a lawn mower, they are usually dense enough so that four inches or even three will do the job. Grass clippings, being fine, can work well at three inches. Sawdust will do the job at three inches. The trick is to snuggle the mulches up close to the growing plants where it is hardest to control weeds. Some weeds will still come up close to the plants you are mulching.

Materials for mulching: It is not a good idea to use fresh barn manure close to leafy vegetables to be eaten directly and besides the ammonia nitrogen will wilt the plants. Barn manure bedding from the previous year is fine, and two or three years old is  better.  I like sheep manure bedding, trampled in the barn by the sheep to a hard, dry mass. I peel it up with a manure fork in layers that are only an inch or two thick, but impenetrable to weeds.

Straw, hay, tree leaves and grass clippings are of course all fine. I pile them near the garden for use the next year. I don’t want them to compost much before use. Finished compost will not smother weeds. Half composted materials may not last out the whole growing season before decomposing. Old hay that is full of weeds seeds is not so desirable, but if you watch carefully when the weed seeds germinate, you can turn the hay mulch over thereby killing the weeds. Chopped up cornstalks, bagasse (dried sugarcane pulp), peat moss, cocoa bean hulls and other commercial products are good but comparatively expensive.

Sawdust or wood shavings, after having served as bedding for chickens, or if well rotted, make a very nice mulch, easy to work in and around garden plants. Fresh sawdust or shavings are less desirable but the caution often given, that they will rob nitrogen from the soil, is not true enough to worry about on a good, rich soil. Reason?  Something almost magical takes place in that inch or so of no man’s land between good soil and the layer of decomposing mulch. Scientists tell me that oil microbes run wild there and create nitrogen as fast as the decomposition process is removing it. This process is otherwise called sheet composting and in my experience is just as effective as a soil builder as going through the laborious process of making compost in piles.

Warnings. If you do a lot of mulch gardening, you will have plenty of earthworms (good) but also a plague of moles (bad).  Also mulch does not control all weeds. Thistles will, given a little time, come right up through most organic mulches. Towards the end of the growing season, grasses will creep in from the edge of the lawn. By fall most kinds of weeds will find their way through the mulch but much fewer in number than not mulching.

On the other hand, mulching works very well on our two most bothersome  weeds:  chickweed and purslane. Yes, I know. Both are quite edible. So? After you eat a ton of the stuff, what do you do with the next four tons?
~
See also Gene’s Organic Garden and Small Farm Skills – Hoemanship
~~
Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author ofThe Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land),
The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises Of Pasture Farming
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
Gene’s Posts
[Permanent Link] [Top]

My Wilderness

From Gene Logsdon (1990)

In human culture is the preservation of wildness.
-Wendell Berry

I used to say that it was but a few steps from the world of my garden to the world of wild woodland, but now I realize how that statement reflects one of the most invidious errors we humans have been making.

It certainly is true that my garden borders woodland. It is also true that a pronounced change in my mentality occurs when I slip from my workaday garden into the wilder haunts of the woods. I am transformed from Mr. MacGregor worrying about Peter Rabbit into Tarzan rallying the jungle animals against the excesses of human civilization. Nor would I deny that my garden serves the side of my rational mind that demands MacGregor-like order in a chaotic world, while my woodland provides me with the wilderness that the mystic, wild side of my nature yearns for.

The error is in thinking that these contrasts represent different worlds. Vegetable gardens are perhaps more human-controlled than are wild woodlands, but the difference blurs with close scrutiny. Every effort to impose an order that would sever the garden completely from wild nature ends in silly futility or catastrophe. One year a neighbor of mine decided that, by God, he was going to get rid of every weed in his sweet corn patch once and for all. He drenched the soil with atrazine above the recommended rate. No weeds for sure, but nothing else would grow there either for three years. At the other extreme, we preserve “wilderness areas” as if we could store nature away like a can of pickles to satisfy momentary cravings. I went to a wilderness area once and got trapped in a colossal trafifc jam. The only wildlife I saw was elbow-to-elbow campers emitting mating calls from portable stereos.

If gardening has taught me anything, it’s that we can’t separate ourselves from wild nature. Even in a hydroponic greenhouse I recently visited, a cat was kept to control mice, and shipments of ladybird beetles were unleashed to eat the aphids. We live in union with a wilderness fundamentally beyond our control or we don’t live long at all. We don’t have the choice of moving from a human world to a nature world, but only from one footstep to another. As Theodore Roszak put it so well in Where the Wasteland Ends (1972):

We forget that nature is, quite simply, the universal continuum, ourselves inextricably included; it is that which mothered us into existence, which will outsurvive us, and from which we have learned (if we still remember the lesson) our destiny. It is the mirror of our identity. Any cultural goods we produce which sunder themselves from this traditional, lively connection with the nonhuman, any thinking we do which isolates itself from, or pits itself against, the natural environment is—strictly speaking—a delusion, and a very sick one. Not only because it will lack ecological intelligence, but because, more critically still, it will lack psychological completeness. It will be ignorant of the greatest truth mankind learned from its ancient intimacy with nature: the reality of spiritual being.

I had to step back and forth from garden to woodland many times before I realized that the line between them was too fine to draw, that the “reality of spiritual being” dissolved the difference I had imagined. Amid the jungle-like fernery of the asparagus patch, for example, nature plays out dramas of eating and being eaten as wild as those that occur among the bulrushes of the woodland creek: the chipping sparrow flits from her nest in the strawberry patch to prey upon larvae of asparagus beetles with all the grisly intensity of the black rat snake snatching into its gaping mouth a field sparrow bathing at the shoreline of of the creek. Wren battles wren for territorial rights to the birdhouse in the apple tree as ferociously as two bucks in the woods battling for supremacy of a deer herd.

The difference between the larvae of lady bird beetles attacking aphids on the lima beans and cheetahs attacking wildebeests on the Serengeti Plain is one of scale only. I learn to measure my progress as a gardener not by the size of my tomato harvest, but by the degree of calmness I can maintain when I abruptly meet a garter snake hunting slugs.

There is only one accurate way to describe the roiling, moiling, toiling scene of the healthy garden: it’s wild! Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species of bugs, birds, worms, and animals move in and out of it, all eating and being eaten. Yet most of the time, this banquet table of soil provides enough food for me, too. The real need to “protect” it comes only when nature’s normalcy has been thwarted, either by its own seemingly chaotic workings or by that of humans.

An ecology-minded world would not need to protect gardens from rabbits because gardeners would understand the continuum of nature and ensure the natural habits and habitats of owls, hawks, foxes, and other animals that feed on rabbits. All else failing, humans would eat their rabbits themselves, with the same gusto that they eat Big Macs. Cabbage patch and wilderness would be one. Tarzan understood gardening better than Mr. MacGregor.

I walk from one part of my property to another as through a continuous wilderness. The vegetable rows, the woods, the pasture, the creek bottom, the little grain- and hayfields are all “garden.” They are all part of the Great Garden that once covered the Earth and might cover it again. As I walk, I pass only from one realm of the Great Garden to another. The more indeterminately the borders coalesce, the more assuredly I achieve the oneness of the natural continuum. The vegetable garden, the most humanly shaped realm, becomes a kind of decontamination chamber, a place where I can slough off the fretting cares of civilization while I pull weeds—lamb’s-quarter, purslane, pigweed (wild amaranth), and sour grass—some of which I realize, wryly, are nearly as tasty as the salad plants I grow.

Then I step into the woods by way of a glade that also serves as backyard lawn. I leave the yard deliberately unkempt so that the mower freaks who visit me can’t tell where lawn ends and wood begins. Who can say whether I should mow here or not—whether I am obeying the strictures of lawn neatness that our rural middlewestern mentality teaches? Raspberries at the woodland edge further blur the border between civilization and wilderness. Are they part of the garden or the woods? I ask the same question of the hickory nuts hovering over them.

In the woods I become a sort of high-tech Tarzan. Loincloths unfortunately are not approved of by rural middlewestern Germanic souls of propriety any more than unmowed lawns, but my belt holds a knife and more (magnifying glass and hand pruners). With binoculars around my neck, I can watch for what food, spiritual or corporeal, this wilder garden has to offer today. I find a luna moth—an endangered species in this region, where even woodland is sometimes mowed—newly emerged from its cocoon, still not ready to fly, glistening pale green and purple. I hold it in one hand and study it through the magnifying glass with the other. I am transfixed by its beauty. Of the unlimited arrangements of color and pattern that moth wings could take, why these particular ones?

I am face-to-face with mystery I cannot fathom, appearing over and over wherever I turn my eye. I begin to understand the meaning of “reality of spiritual being.” Here is knowledge that science has not yet imagined, not visible to magnifying glass or the most powerful microscope. The moth flutters away. It soon will mate and lay eggs if a bird does not catch it first, and then it will die shortly, its magnificence “wasted” if not for my chance meeting with it. Perhaps wasted. In the realm of spiritual being, perhaps is the most necessary word in any language.

Leaving the woods, I enter my pasture, a miniature version of the Serengeti Plain, another mode of the Great Garden. Here, wild and domestic life mingles even more intensely than in the vegetable rows and orchard. I once sowed “improved” grasses and clovers here, believing the universities, which told me these improvements would be better for my cows and sheep than the herbage that nature grew. Nature laughed at such pride and sowed more enduring plants. In almost every case, the wilder ones have proved better for the livestock than the university-improved ones, not to mention for the birds and insects that also live there. Even the “weeds,” except some of the more noxious ones introduced from Europe by pioneers who also thought they could improve the native landscape, make good grazing. If I mow occasionally, the pasture takes care of itself.

Meadowlarks sing from fenceposts, bluebirds nest in the houses I have set atop some posts, kingbirds sit on the fence wire between the posts, bobolinks burble and spin up over the fence and into the grass again, barn swallows dart at bugs rising from the grass, field sparrows crouch over nests of eggs at the base of bull thistles. Cowbirds perch on the back of the cow and the sheep, watching for flies. I rake the meadow with my binoculars and gather the whole scene into a spiritual harvest.

I pass into a third realm of the Great Garden: my fields of corn, oats, wheat, and clover hay. Red-winged blackbirds walk the cornrows, stolidly hunting cutworms. I turn over a lump of barn manure that didn’t get worked into the soil at planting time and uncover two ground beetles, a species that also feeds on cutworms and wireworms. I lift another manure clump and find two more. The reason for these unworked clumps is that a killdeer had been nesting there at planting time, and I dodged her with the tractor and disk. In the wheat plot, a path of trampled stalks leading into the stand tells me that raccoons or groundhogs are probably in the field, digging burrows that the growing grain stalks already hide from view. I scowl, the Mr. MacGregor in me asserting himself.

I pass into a fourth realm of the Great Garden, the grove of trees through which the creek winds. I sit on the bridge I built across the stream, my legs dangling over the side, and gaze into the water tumbling over the rock dam the children built. The sound of water over the stones is spring’s best music, next to the meadowlark’s song. Along the bank, almost in the water, a wild iris blooms. It appears to have been deliberately planted there, I catch myself thinking, still needing to remind myself that nature was planting flowers long before humans and can do the job just as well.

Suddenly, a fish flies between my dangling legs. It leaps from the water under the bridge in an arc up over the dam into the upper pool. I can’t believe my eyes, so I wait. Another one! At least a dozen dance over the dam as I watch. How did these common little shiners and larger suckers (as we call them) learn to leap dams built by children? There are no natural rock dams in our world of mud-bottomed creeks, far from the salmon runs of the wild Mackenzie. And yet, is the “real” wilderness any more spiritually vitalizing than this humdrum remnant left in these Ohio farmlands? If all the land were kept as part of the Great Garden, there would be little need for wilderness parks.

But all land is not kept this way. I walk into a section where, as far as my eye can see, there is nothing but plowed soil. I come here to hunt flint arrowheads and stone hammers left by the Tarzans of another era. I search a while, but the stillness, the eerie emptiness of hundreds of plowed acres stretching into the gathering dusk, overwhelms me. No barns, houses, pastures, woodlands, or fencerows are visible. I have entered a strange planet, one which man has almost succeeded in severing from the full life of nature. Ironically, the men who create these moonscapes for money use the profit to vacation in far-off wilderness areas.

I shiver from some vague fear. A vision of nature decapitated spreads before my mind’s eye: a future in which this countryside is slowly but surely turned from its original Great Garden into a desert stretching between lonely roads, a no-man’s-land between cities. I see whole townships and counties where a virtually limitless variety of plants, insects, animals, and humans all in their allotted niches once lived—field, pasture, woodland, farmstead, and village—now turned into empty spaces of pulverized, eroding soil producing surplus corn, rootworms, poor-quality food, and an unhealthy society. The Indians left their flints to mark the passing of their culture. I have only a hoe with a shiny handle to mark the end of mine.

I retreat back to country where the Great Garden is still remembered. A wood thrush sings as I approach my tree grove, renewing my hope. The dark vision cannot come to reality, the thrush seems to be telling me, because the coninuum of wild nature is even stronger in humans than the continuum of greed. Even the agribusinessmen will understand, once the wilderness areas they escape to are all paved with traffic jams and populated with deanimalized bears eating human garbage. Then everyone will be convinced that the only “escape” is to make all the Earth over into the various realms of the Great Garden.
~
See also Gene’s The Man Who Created Paradise
~~
Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author ofThe Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land),
The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises Of Pasture Farming
Excerpted from At Nature’s Pace: Farming and the American Dream (1990)
Image Credits: Deer © Mike Rogal | Dreamstime.com
Beetles © Rusty Dodson | Dreamstime.com
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
Gene’s Posts
[Permanent Link] [Top]

Unexpected Benefits From Pasture Farming

From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

The biggest problem in pasture farming, that is raising farm animals almost entirely on pastures without much annual soil cultivation for grains, is internal parasites, especially in the more humid parts of the country. Parasitic worms hatch into the larval stage in the soil and crawl up the grass stems where they are ingested by the grazing animals. The worms’ eggs then pass out of the animals in the manure, and cycle back through the soil and up the grass stems to be ingested again. As pasture farmers increase livestock numbers because they have learned how to increase the carrying capacity of their pastures, the more the problem is exacerbated and the more they have to rely on various wormers. Treating sheep with vermifuges three times a summer has become necessary in some cases and even that may not do the job very well. Internal parasites seem to be growing immune to the usual medications, necessitating the use of different, stronger and more expensive ones.

We shepherds have learned that taking the animals off a pasture for a month does not break the worm cycle on that pasture, as used to be commonly believed. However a pasture not grazed for a year can eliminate or greatly reduce infestation. Medieval farmers resorted to dividing their land into two parts and alternately grazing only half in any given year. But today, graziers don’t think they can afford to pasture only half their land (so much for progress) and put hay or grain alternately in the other half. That would mean doing annual cultivation of half the farm every year thereby losing the cost-saving advantages of permanent or nearly permanent pasture.

But there might be an effective compromise that rotational grazing makes possible. At least it has worked for us so far— keep your fingers crossed.  In earlier years, we had gotten to the point where we had to worm the sheep three times a summer to keep them healthy.   (Sheep with stomach worms have pale eyes, scraggly wool, invariably have rear ends coated with manure, and the lambs do not gain weight efficiently.)  Now we are back to only one worming a year and I have hopes of eliminating the job completely.

We have experimented with various schedules and carrying rates on our rotated pastures to arrive at what seems, all things considered, the best for us: a division into eight plots of about an acre and a half in size, with two other woodsy plots grazed only irregularly to give the animals a chance to eat acorns and walnut leaves and other wild plants traditionally thought to be helpful in controlling internal parasites. Each of the eight plots, or paddocks as graziers call them, is grazed for one week at a time and then the sheep are moved on to the next. That means any given plot has sheep on it only one week roughly every two months. In a grazing season of eight months, each plot is visited only one month (four separate weeks) out of the year at two months intervals. Parasitic worms do not have a chance to build up high populations under this regimen. The animals are allowed the run of all the plots in winter because worms aren’t active in cold weather. Although this is not quite once-a-year grazing, it seems to work so far.

To help this kind of parasite control, I usually mow a  paddock following one or two of  its four grazing periods  to control weeds that the animals might not have eaten and to encourage lush new growth of grass and clover. Mowing helps control worms, so the books say.

I’m sure that part of the reason we have had success this way is that we don’t overcrowd our pastures. We keep around 20 ewes on about 14 acres. From April until October, there will be another 20 to 30 lambs too,  or altogether, roughly about three and a half head per acre. Normal carrying capacity on our kind of soil and climate is five sheep per acre.  A commercial shepherd might find  our stocking rate too low to be profitable, but I wonder. If we can eliminate internal parasites we might make as much net profit with a low carrying rate.

I can’t resist sharing another, somewhat humorous benefit from rotational grazing. When the sheep see me coming to switch them into another plot, they run ahead of me like a herd of crazed buffaloes to the gate, then turn around and stare at me expectantly. They know the routine.

I used to wish I had a good border collie to help me move the sheep.  Now I don’t need one. All I have to do is stand at a gate, any gate, and call a bit and no matter where the sheep are, they will come running. The grass where they are grazing might still be good,  but if the master is calling, it must be better on the other side of the fence. Finally they will even come into the barn lot without being driven if I stand at the gate and call. Going through gates just gets to be a habit with them, an indication of better things to come. Wish it were that easy to instill hope in human society in these paranoid days.
~
See also Gene’s Our Ewes Are Having Lots Of Lambs, But Is More Better?
~~
Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author ofThe Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land),
The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life, and All Flesh Is Grass: Pleasures & Promises Of Pasture Farming
Image Credit: © John Manning | Dreamstime.com
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
Gene’s Posts
[Permanent Link] [Top]