Garden mulched for the year – 2009

Well now that the garden is officially done for the year, about two or three weekends ago I cleared out any of the leftovers in the garden, which was a sage plant, a row of green onions and a row of chives. I did a little bit of hand weeding and picked what was left of the herbs, and then I used my propane torch to burn out everything else. After everything was burned out and cooled down, I laid down a layer of grass clippings and shredded leaves. So next spring instead of raking up all the mulch on the ground, I’ll just till it into the soil and hopefully I’ll have less weeds to start the season, since the ground will be covered in mulch to begin with. But we’ll see, come spring 2010.

As a side note, I also deadheaded all the flowers in the front yard. And I also moved the East Kent Golding rhizome over a couple of feet, since it was growing too close to the Centennial hops.

I do have some ideas for next years garden. Its nothing too radical, but it will take some lessons learned the last couple of years and apply them to next years garden.

1) Put more space between the tomatoes, both individual plants and rows.
2) Instead of growing cucumbers vertically, I’m going to use them as ground cover for every other row of peppers, as well as in between the tomatoes. Since growing cucumbers vertically the last couple of years, just hasn’t worked out as planned.
3) Start green beans very early in the ground, maybe around mid-April.
4) Once again I’m going to pick almost all the rhubarb stalks in the early part of the season. So that it will give me a second harvest of stalks later in the season.
5) I’m going to grow the hops diagonally instead of vertically, to try and give them some more sunlight and length to grow.
6) I’m going to start the flowers around late January or mid-February since they seem to take forever to germinate.
7) Possibly pick up some cheap landscaping fabric to use as ground cover instead of mulch. I saw this cleaver idea on the Johnny Select Seed blog. So I might be giving this a try for the beets/chives/green onions.

3 comments on “Garden mulched for the year – 2009

  • Oh yes I still have mole issues, they even started to dig around the front yard. The plan for next year, is to apply more them one application of a “diazinon” like granular insecticide. since I have a big time grub issue in my yard. I think that the moles are feeding on the grubs, so if I get rid of the grubs, it will hopefully get rid of the moles.

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