Thursday, July 4, 2019

Moving the Garden to a New Equilibrium Condition

One of the projects I'm doing this year is installing a border around the garden. I pile up wood scraps from the greenhouse build (I'll do a post on that once it's done), plus old rotting logs from the woods, and top it off with wood shavings. The idea is to separate the garden area from the yard so the plants that spread along the surface of the ground, or via roots, or runners can't breech the barricade. Also, the rotting wood is a food source, hopefully, for more fungi. If the garden can be coaxed into a condition where the soil food web has more of a fungal component, then that should be good for the crops, and help to suppress weeds.

I noticed last year, that the most effective weed suppressant was autumn leaves. In the garden where I've got a layer of leaves down, there have been zero weeds encroaching from the yard or sprouting from seeds. This fall, I'll redo some of our flower beds with a layer of leaves as a weed barrier, then cover that with pine bark mulch, which also does a good job at weed suppression.

Straw is not nearly as effective, and by the warm season (soil temperatures > 70F), grass and other weeds start peeking through. Woodchips are somewhere in between.

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