I have no idea what they are but I’m just excited to see mushrooms growing in my garden over the past couple days. It pleases me to know my soil is happy and healthy.
This is my first garden and I’ve decided to use clover as ground cover. It’ll take a couple years to determine if it does what I hope it will accomplish. So far I’m quite happy with how things are turning out and am learning so much.
I’m currently and impatiently waiting to try the first cherry tomatoes but the first bunch should be ripe within the next week.
Mushrooms are just so neat. I’ve inoculated a log with oysters but haven’t seen any yet.
Do you really have that much mulch? The other day I was watering and I realized that the bark mulch was hydrophobic and not letting any moisture in at all. Internet said I had applied it too think maybe. So I pulled off most of it. Watered the dirt directly and immediately noticed a change in my plants. I thought bark mulch would be such a benefit but really maybe not. In the veggie beds I only use straw which seems to do a lot better but obviously doesn’t look so great for the flower beds. What kind of mulch do you use and are you having that issue at all?
Yep! I wanted to kill the pervasive bermuda grass without RoundUp, so I used ChipDrop in late 2021 and got something like 70 cubic yards of mulch piled on my front lawn. Gave a little bit away, but used most of it to bury the grass around my front yard garden, which is about 1,750 square feet in total. Here’s a before and after.
Annoyingly the grass is so persistent, it’s still poking up through the mulch, but by pulling those stolons when they appear, we’re slowly winning a war of attrition. I don’t use the mulch on my raised boxes or where I’ve planted in the ground, there I use straw, but I run drip lines under the straw so it really shouldn’t matter for water infiltration.
I have noticed a massive uptick in the bugs in my yard, the mulch is decomposing fast and is loaded with worms, millipedes, grubs and beetles, which has brought a lot more birds around too. I also noticed that the tomatoes I planted in the ground adjacent to the mulch took off way faster than those in my boxes, despite the boxes having been filled with the same soil from the front yard (excavated for a driveway expansion), and lovingly amended with excellent compost.
[Image description: two rows of young tomato seedlings planted along the edges of an arched trellis. The closer row is planted in a raised bed, and is noticeably smaller than the farther row that is directly in the ground, despite them having been planted at the same time.]
It looks really nice and easy to manage. I’m glad to not have the Bermuda grass here but we have our own issues. Like blackberries and knotweed. Now can you walk through that hoop? And how do you use it? Is there a plastic cover for it? I love how you have opted for food instead of lawn too I wanted to say.
You sure can walk through it, it’s tall enough my 6’ fiance fits standing underneath. We usually only barely kiss freezing a few times in the winter, so I haven’t bothered to use it to try to keep things warmer. I weave tomatoes over it in the summer and peas in the winter.
I need to take an updated photo (the arch is fully covered now), but here’s a before/after of pruning and weaving this year’s tomatoes on it after they went wild when I was on vacation in May: