Mulching makes such a difference!

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Until recently I didn’t even know what mulching really meant. I remember as a child reading the Magic Roundabout stories, in which Mr McHenry was always out and about with his wheelbarrow, “mulching a few plants” – although it never showed him actually doing anything other than pushing the barrow so I didn’t know what he was really doing. In my parents’ garden we would apply ‘muck’ (manure) to the vegetables or the roses so I thought perhaps ‘mulch’ was just a posh word for this. I now know that a mulch is basically anything that covers the surface of the soil to suppress weeds and/or cut down evaporation. It can be compost, grass clippings, chipped bark, shredded woody garden waste, even gravel or slate chips or, as in this case, newspaper. And it makes an enormous difference. I first tried this last year when we had to go away for a few days. Normally I need to water tomato plants in the greenhouse at least once a day. Before, we had rigged up an automatic watering system using a water butt and some leaky hosepipe – but the holes kept getting blocked up so it only worked for a while. So I tried just giving the plants loads of water and then covering the surface of the soil with newspaper, and it worked like a charm – they were fine for several days and didn’t need watering at all! Now I’m doing it routinely and it certainly makes life much easier. I’m using newspaper inside, because it’s easy to lift up the edge and water underneath. Outdoors I use grass clippings or shredded branches, basically whatever I have to hand. Maybe it doesn’t look quite as neat as the ‘traditional’ vegetable garden with tidy rows of plants with bare, weed-free soil in between, but it saves a lot of time and also saves the plants from suffering stressful periods of drought in between waterings. The only problem is finding enough material to use! Do you do this in your garden? All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2023.