Gardening Method Hype

We did two "deep mulch" garden areas. One is covered in about 4" of wood chips (they were newly shredded when I put them down last fall). One was covered in straw and cardboard. Some beds were just covered with several inches of straw.

The wood chips might improve the soil by next year. This year, though, many of the plants in the wood chips are really struggling for various reasons. One of the supposed selling points of wood chips--that they regulate water in the soil--does not seem to be true in our conditions. In some places, even though there's several inches of wood chips, and we've had a lot of rain, the plants seem to prefer as frequent watering as they did when the ground was bare and tilled.

The cardboard/straw combo was almost disastrous. The cardboard did kill the grass, but it also turned some areas of the garden into a swamp. We planted strawberries into the cardboard and straw. The berries started to develop root rot, and I subsequently stripped back the straw and cardboard and planted cover crops--which I should have done very early in the season. The plants did recover, finally, but it was a bit of a panic. The straw worked well in suppressing weeds and keeping the ground moist, but the depth needed adjustment through the season. Some of the strawberries are thriving and others are struggling.

It seems like every gardening method is sold as a panacea using religious language, e.g. "back to eden wood chip mulch", but any given method might not apply in every given soil situation and might not apply uniformly through the year. It will probably take several years of planting, adding compost and other amendments to really improve our situation and to learn what's going to work on our property.

No-Till Learning Curve Woes

We've got three patches of sunflowers growing in the yard. The longer term plan is to convert most of what was previously lawn to gardens and orchard. Over the past couple of years I've learned that the soil on the farm varies drastically from place to place. Some is fantastic: either it wasn't farmed previously, or has been enriched by the nearby black locust trees. Some is really bad: the topsoil is almost gone. The rest is somewhere between.

Last year I trucked in 15 cubic yards of woodchips for the garden, and 10 cubic yards of mulch for flower beds. The left over mulch decomposed nicely into something resembling deep black soil. Over the winter, the woodchips in the garden broke down unevenly. Some is like soil. Some looks like it did the day I moved them.

Some sunflowers from the same batch of seeds have been planted in each soil type. The seeds in the decomposed mulch are rocking. They're 2-3x larger than the garden sunflowers, which are doing reasonably well, too, and they're enormous compared to the seeds I planted in the yard without tilling. Those are really struggling in the poor soil areas.

The soil in the no-till yard patches seems pretty lifeless. The worms are only right at the surface. A few inches below the surface it's a uniform brown material with no roots and very little organic matter that's visible to the eye. It seems like it will be a multi-year project to improve the soil in those areas.