Lawn to Food Forest - 10 - Mulch Madness!

it's been a little bit since i've made an update video on our lawn to food forest conversion project with our lovely neighbor so today i'm going to show what we've been up to here no major new developments in fact a bunch of issues around heat and dryness and so i'll share notes on that but right now we're focusing on some deep mulch some real ruth stout style deep deep mulch and let me talk about that first little update is the pond scene still a ways to go it's not that different from last time it's been holding water pretty well it's gone down just a little bit with the dryness we've had we had some rain the other day but it wasn't enough to really recharge this in any significant way we can see the frogs are going nuts for this space in fact there's little piles of eggs all over the place so it's becoming a real frog sanctuary we're excited to get this finalized sometime in the next month or so we're gonna rent an actual proper excavator and do a much larger installation but the solar panel with the small pump delivering to the garden that's been a really nice element to work with you can see the rice is still growing well we don't have enough space to plant out the rest of the rice so i think that may not come to fruition this year but oh well some of the squash that we've planted are doing pretty nicely overall some have died i think because of the heat stress this area where there's a good diversity of plants that were planted out early and i was able to water them more regularly because it's so close to the pond they seem to be doing pretty well and we've got some beautiful winter squash starting to fill out in here we'll see how it goes fingers crossed but no expectations with the weather the way it's been we added in some tomato starts in here didn't get around to trellising them so we'll just let them sprawl along the ground and just see what happens but they're actually looking really good growing nicely i think they really appreciate this heat and i think they'll really appreciate all the mulch which i'll talk about in a little bit here in a recent video i talked about getting some cover crop on this huge lump of subsoil that came out in the last pass of digging the pond probably pretty too low in organic matter and too thick to be a great productive solution in the future so we'll have to spread out the remaining digging a lot more up into the lawn but you can see the cover crop is coming in a bit pretty weak we haven't watered haven't done much with it the black spanish round radish elements are doing beautifully they're off and running the beans are doing pretty well but i think there's either rabbits or groundhogs in the area that are having a lot of fun trying to get at these and a nice surprise is so far these little carpets of carrot seedlings and parsnips coming up all along the top so we're hoping for some more rain if it doesn't happen we'll give it some water and give them a chance but there may be still a chance of harvesting some root crops off of here i would love to have shown you this just being gobs of deep green in all directions but this is what it is and at least it's working a little bit we had some deer brows starting to come in so i put up it's not electrified but i found ten rolls of this sheep netting and i figured i would put up one just to see if it deflects them maybe you would put a second one i mean it's super small it's only three feet high but so far it seems like it's kept the deer from moving in for the most part the deer browse hasn't been intense so but i've left this open so that yesterday i could start bringing in all of these hay bales we bought over 100 from some folks we've purchased hay from in the past 250 a bale for these really nice tight freshly made bales definitely could have been animal feed but i guess they said they had a little too much goldenrod and milkweed but that's fine by us and so what i'm trying to do now is actually get this whole space thoroughly mulched these walkways in between beds in some ways aesthetically it's pleasing when it's tightly mowed and weed whacked on the edges but it's a lot more management than i want to do and in the long run we'd rather have more production space and less lawn incursions in this space you can see and hear how that pattern can play out so we've added tons of hay with an area that was in grass as of yesterday and then with the tromboncino squash it's a beautiful wonderful summer squash that one's not that amazing looking but we've been eating them like crazy these vines spread thoroughly and so as we add the mulch and they spread add the mulch and the sunflowers cast shade we've got that competition and i think we can mulch our way out of having a lawn in here the gardens will stay the same basic layout but they probably will spread quite a bit in here even with the dryness most of the perennial elements in this case the elderberries that went in these were rooted marge elderberries they've established nicely and they're putting on another round of fresh green growth so they feel to me like they're in a great space to just be here they're going to do it and especially now that we're putting mulch around them after that rain that should lock in the soil moisture that they got and give them a chance sea berries definitely were holding on for deer life for a little bit but they are doing okay they're even making some fruit and what's very promising to me is here's a seaberry that down below these are all new shoots these actually are coming off of the route and so in year one in a drought year not only are they establishing but some of them are beginning to sucker in thicket form and the hope is to have them basically colonize this whole area become a seaberry thicket and then we can grow vines up and through them so the winter squash of the future will be planted next to the nitrogen fixing seaberry and use the seaberry as their trellis so it's more conservative with space and it feels like we might be on track to have that happen i put in about an hour this morning in this area this chipping away at mulching we might keep a little mo strip right down through the middle here since it's kind of like a major or a minor-ish alleyway that gets us towards the chicken yard maybe on this side although i'm leaning towards mulching that out as well and certainly we'll be mulching fully this strip it's harder to manage than i'd like and we'll mulch on the other side of these sunchokes and of course this will remain lawn for now but so far i've chewed into i would say let's say six bales so what is that around 15 or so worth of mulch has really provided some weed suppression for each of these in this case elderberry white currants and black currants simplified our management so no more mowing through here we'll just move the mulch around as grass pops up we'll cover it like whack-a-mole style for the weeds and we'll leave a few bales intact in this area so we can open them up and work with them later if we need that one way i can deal with the weeds for example around this black currant that's getting established is to go through and pull every single plant that's growing around it now even the ones that are right next to it but it's been dry enough but that's actually pretty stressful for the current too so i can go in there and rip and rip and rip but now i've left this open soil which will be more prone to drying out so i've done this and now i've got to go get water and water it because i've stressed out the current and almost certainly i'll have to repeat this every few weeks for the rest of the season because now it's bare soil and the weeds will have to come back here's another black currant similar size similar amount of weeds now instead of pulling every last weed i'm simply going to lay them down a lot of times i'll just do this with my feet but i'll be a little bit more detailed in here push them down sneak the hay under [Music] and there we go i didn't stress the current root system out at all so i don't need to add the additional layer of bringing water because this hasn't gone through a stressful moment i don't have to think about bringing more compost to this current because as the hay breaks down that'll provide nutrients and food for the earthworms and i may have to repeat this with more hay later it's pretty likely actually but i would have to do the same thing if i pulled the weeds so each time i add more hay i have less and less work to do there's more and more fertility and there's more and more water retention in the soil it's the path i'd much prefer i could be on my hands and knees doing this and that's nice for much smaller plants in detail but for the most part what we do is just simply step the weeds down with a foot or two and throw some loose mulch on top maybe i'll pull aside the plant that's there mulch on top so for the most part i'm not even leaning i'm not down on my hands and knees or getting up and down certainly not pulling a lot and i'm not even needing to have tools with me while i do this neat trick that might be useful if you forget to bring pruners or scissors or a knife with you when you're out working the bales hay bales or straw bales that are wrapped with this orange or green twine it's a little harder to do this with metal but you can open them by finding one side coming coming to the corner and slipping that over the corner you might find a little stick helps with that but as soon as this corners off now i've got a whole nice loop i can reuse for all sorts of different things and then opening it the rest of the way is simply going in the middle leaning it to one side and now it's open it's an easy way to get access to the hay the beauty of doing this kind of work is that once the bales are in position i don't really need tools with me and it's very light labor to do this kind of mulch it's way less intense than being on my hands and knees weeding all of this out and then having to water and then bring fertility later on maybe i'll do another more formal update on the potato patch experiment but for those of you that have been following interesting note is that here we are early august mid-season we're on our way towards the end of the season for these potatoes and surprisingly to me they have basically unified i can't tell the different experiments they do not pop out so maybe in the center they're slightly larger but basically i could have dug and flipped the soil planted a potato broken up the soil then mulched moved the mulch aside put some compost planted a potato and mulched or just moved the mulch aside and dropped a potato and put the mulch back and they all would have worked so good news in the future could have planted however i wanted and there'd still be potatoes it seems interesting we've got a bunch of bales queued up that are in reserve for when we do the actual excavation of taking the pond much further out and the thought is that as he works with a larger excavator which would be roughly that shape the boom can come out and deposit a scoop of wet subsoil and i can put hay on top subsoil hay on top basically layer layer layer and let it be this lumpy landscape up in here but with all this organic matter injected into each of those layers rather than these monolithic lumps of straight solid clay and stone it'll be all these layers i think that'll be a much bigger improvement i'll go into more detail with that when we actually do it but that's the plan with these 15 or so bales that are here that's enough chatting for now i think i'm going to get back to actually doing the work i'm supposed to do in my mind of mulching and simplifying and unifying these garden beds into contiguous ruth stout style solid deeply mulched productive spaces next video you see there should be pretty much no lawn in this entire area will be converted over entirely to production and minor walkways and for year one in a pretty significantly dry challenging year in not the greatest soil at 1200 foot elevation on a north slope i'm very pleased with how things are going so thanks for watching let me know what you think what ways could we be doing this better what sort of questions do you have and how are your gardens doing

Channel: EdibleAcres

Views: 31,815

Keywords: ruth stout, mulch, garden mulching, mulching with hay, permaculture, lawn to food forest, mulching a garden, weeding with hay, hay as mulch, ruthstout, no till, permaculture organic, organic gardening, organic garden, organic

Id: 2wUxChaMPHY

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020