March 16th, 2005 - Mulch
I have grand plans for my garden this summer. One thing I’m missing is mulch. Growing up, we always used grass clippings from our fairly substantial yard to mulch around plants. It’s a great idea and I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it. You only have to weed a little bit if you mulch promptly!
But we have dogs, so we can’t use grass clippings from our yard. We also have a mluching lawn mower, so my husband really doesn’t want the hassle of collecting the clippings from the front yard (which is fairly small, and will be getting smaller as I develop part of into a fruit garden). I don’t know anyone who collects their clippings, and I’d have to make sure they didn’t use chemicals (or have dogs). My Dad gave me the solution: shredded paper!
I was already shredding receipts and financial papers. Now, instead of putting them out for the recyclers, I’m recycling them! I’ve saving all of my office paper and junk mail that isn’t glossy and shredding. I think it will take a lot of paper for this to work. So far, I have three garbage partially full. It’s hard to fill them up because the paper flies out very easily! Now that I’m back at work, I’m saving my recycled paper here as well.
And under the shredded paper, I’ll place newspaper. We did thiswhen I was a kid, too. It doesn’t work on it’s own because it’s too easily caught by the wind. But it’s a fantastic layer under mulch. It doesn’t last the whole summer, usually, but a fair while. A second layer can always be placed when the first layer and mulch disintegrates. Mulch is also a great way to add additional nutrients to the garden soil. I’m not sure that paper is the best for this–but my soil is so poor anything added to it in the way of bio-material has to improve it!
May 26th, 2006 at 5:48 am EDT
[…] (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.) […]