May 26th, 2006 - Thanks to mulch!
I’m so glad Mom and Dad taught me about mulch! We had a torrential downpour for about 30 minutes yesterday at 1:10 (I was eating lunch in the Union and got stuck). Everyone with a garden said they figured they would have to replant as all their seeds would have been washed away. Not me–I was pretty confident that they wouldn’t. Indeed, when I got home, I found that just one line of mulch had been washed around. Everything else looks fine. Luckily, I had put my tomato and pepper plants along the west side of the garden, next to the bushes. The rain mostly came from the west, so they were protected. They didn’t even get knocked over!
My parents use grass clippings for mulch. My brother Michael had allergies so he usually didn’t have to mulch the garden. He also had this little problem…. We used newspapers underneath the mulch (a fantastic addition to keeping weeds at bay) and he would always get interested in articles and especially the comics and stop mulching and sit there and read! I was thinking about these times as I mulched and paper over the weekend. (Hi, Michael! Please don’t shut down my blog due to little embarassing stories from childhood…..)
Unfortunately, we don’t have grass clippings here. Three-fold problem. 1) The backyard is where the dogs poop and we can’t ever manage to find every bit of it. I do not want to handle such grass clippings. 2) We bought a mulching lawnmower that chomps the grass fine enough to leave it on the yard. 3) Our yard isn’t big enough to provide enough clippings anyway.
(If this sounds familiar, I wrote about mulch last year, too. It’s s thing of mine….I just don’t understand why more people don’t mulch! One addition: I’ve found that shredded newsprint and phonebooks work the best. Regular paper stays very bright white, which reflects sunlight needed to warm the soil (and later on, the reflected light could hurt the plants). The newspaper and phonebooks are a darker, thinner paper than darkens and degrades more quickly. I didn’t remember this over the winter so didn’t shred much newspaper. I’m making up for it now. I also realized that a mix of the two kinds of paper might work nicely. I was going to layer newspaper on the top, but that’s a pain. I will use my first mix tonight I hope and see how it compares to the two beds I have in that used just office papers. Another great mulch materials is weeds. Two of my beds have been mluched this way. I collected weeds and grass from the areas we spread wood chips as well as grass in the beds. As the summer goes on, I also use the weeds from the garden to mulch. Just lay them right back down where you pull them up.)
May 26th, 2006 at 8:01 am EDT
Lies. ALL LIES.
May 28th, 2006 at 8:25 pm EDT
Ha! BTW “OtherMichael” *is* my brother Michael. He came up with that name because of a friendship with a distant relative also named Ann Marie (mine used to have the space, too) who *also* has a brother named Michael! She’s a couple years younger than me, so it was our parents’ idea first.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:49 am EDT
Actually, I came up with the prefix whilst in the workplace and trying to deal with multiple “Michaels” in conversation. Someone would say “you mean Michael [blah blah blah] ?” And the inevitable response would be “no, the OTHER Michael.”
See, EVERYBODY knows a Michae. I’m the Other one.