HI, I’m Ed Bruske, we’ve been talking about how you can grow your own vegetable garden outside your own home. Right now we’re going to take a look at using mulch in your garden.
Mulch is something that you put down around your plants mainly to retain moisture. And there are all different ways of doing that and all different materials. Usually, you’ll see something like what I have here, which is a semi-rodded straw that I happen to have lying in a corner of the garden and I'm putting it around my potato plants here which are very happy, they were planted the day after St. Patrick’s day, which is just the right time to plant them and watch them grow. And as you can see, they are doing very well. They might also like to have several inches of soil actually mounded up around the bottom to the plants to help produce the potatoes.
I'm just giving them a few inches of straw here. Other kinds of materials you can use are wood chips or coco bean shells. You may have heard of something called sheet mulching, which is something that’s done on a large scale even on organic farms where they lay down black plastic over the fields and then transplant the plants through the plastic into the soil and the plastic not only helps retain the moisture but surprises the leaves. So that would be a second reason to put down mulch that would be to help suppress the leaves. And you got to put down a pretty thick layer to do that. The mulch around these potato plants might get to be four inches or so thick and that would help keep the soil cool and moist, which helps the microorganisms in the soil and also helps suppress any weeds, keeps them from germinating.
Now there's another method of mulching that I like to use, you may notice that these potato plants are spaced pretty close together, and I do that with most of my plants and that’s called self-mulching. I don’t do that with a tomato plant because they want to have plenty of breathing room around them but for greens, salads, carrots, beets, I like to group them even closer than it might suggest on the seed packets. Because when the plants grow, they create such dense foliage that they’re actually making their own mulch, that’s called self-mulching, where the foliage is so dense that it lowers the temperature underneath the plants and shades out any weeds that may want to grow up in there.
So, you just continue plants well-mulched like this, that will save you water, you won’t have to water as much or as often because the mulch is retaining the moisture in the soil, so mulching, putting down a thick layer of mulch actually saves the gardener, effort in the long run, not as much watering, not nearly as much weeding.
The next thing I'm going to talk to you about is how to water your garden.
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