The Maine Mulch

by Dennis Fisher and Joe Fisher

 

One good indicator that summer is here is that my friends start showing up in magazine articles. Farmers become very popular during produce season. Brad Hunter of Appleton Creamery, supplier of goat cheese to the Belfast Farmers' Market, appears in the latest Cooking Light with a bowl full of fresh picked corn and a big grin on his face.

Summer is also mulch season. Even though we've had some rain these past few months, the water table is still low. Mulch is one way that the grower can help counter the drying trend of recent years, either alone or coupled with irrigation. Mulch is also a good way to control weeds, to improve the health of your soil, prevent erosion of topsoil, discourage pests and encourage beneficial predatory insects.

What makes a good mulch? It depends what you want to do, your budget, and your available resources. It's nice to be able to use found materials as mulch, not only to save money but to make the best use of what's around. Such found materials include spoiled hay, leaves, pine needles, newspapers and wood shavings.

Good mulch should be dry, light, but shouldn't blow away easily. Any fresh cut materials like grasses won't last long as mulches, they just melt away to nothing. It's better to leave these to dry a while before applying. Compost is also good but will disappear just as quickly unless covered with something like straw, bark mulch or wood chips.

Some kinds of plantings, especially long season vegetables, trees, and perennials, grow better when mulched. For instance, it's hard to grow good asparagus without mulch. The weeds, especially quack grass, will quickly take over unless smothered. I usually mulch asparagus with dry leaves covered with a layer of spoiled hay. The hay keeps the leaves from blowing off the beds and the leaves form a layer that helps suppress weeds and holds in moisture. Mulch also keeps the ground cool and helps extend the asparagus season.

I used to use spoiled hay to mulch just about everything. The stuff is available everywhere, can be had cheap or for free, and makes good mulch. The problem is that even though a thick pile of hay will help keep down weeds, it is also seeding weeds at the same time. If you let the hay rot for a while it kills some of the grass and weed seeds, but not all of them. Finally, faced with an ever increasing annual grass problem in my fields, I gave up spoiled hay for everything except asparagus.

My mulch of choice is now straw. Since I don't grown grain I have to pay for straw, but by looking around you can usually get a pretty good price. One good way to buy straw is directly from the farmer. If you pick it up in the field "behind the baler", you may only pay two dollars a bale or so. A lot more grain is being grown in the County now, and this may bring prices down.

You may still get weeds with straw, but not nearly as many as with hay, and usually these are just sprouted seeds of whatever grain, usually oats or rye, that the straw came from.

Young trees will get a good start on life if you mulch them for the first few years after planting. My friend Mark Fulford of Teltane Farm suggests amending the soil around the tree with rock powders and compost, then laying down cardboard and covering this with wood chips. This will keep grass from competing the tree for nutrients and water.

I never had much luck chipping wood for mulch. Even with the big, powerful chipper I borrowed once, it took forever even to make a small pile of chips, and the machine was loud and smoky. I prefer getting wood chips from road crews. They are usually happy to drop off huge piles of chips for the asking. Pine needles, with their high acidity, are good for mulching blueberry plantings.

Many different kinds of mulches are available commercially. Buckweat and cocoa hulls and bark mulch are among the mundane and exotic materials, mostly waste products from agriculture or logging, that can be bought for this purpose. Buying locally and in bulk are probably the least expensive ways to get these.

Then there are the man made fabric mulches. These include landscape cloth and "black plastic" or IRT mulch. Landscape cloth is a long lasting ground cover that is often used to suppress weeds around perennial plantings. It is loosely woven and breaths, and moisture will pass through it. This material is often used as flooring for greenhouses.

IRT mulch is used a lot in my profession. It's a thin black or sometimes red ground covering that comes in various widths and lengths but is usually four feet wide, intended to cover one growing bed in a field. This kind of mulch is mainly used under heat loving long season annual vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants.

Black plastic mulch is very good at heating soil to produce earlier crops, and at suppressing weeds. It is durable enough for a couple of seasons but usually pulled up after one. As a non-permeable material, it will not pass water and usually some means of irrigation, such as drip tape or soaker hose, is used under the plastic.

On a small scale, IRT mulch can be applied by hand, though it's a lot of work. We still do that at my farm, though not very willingly. In most commercial operations a mulch layer, pulled by a tractor, is used instead.

The Belfast Farmers'Market is open Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 9-1 at Reny's Plaza in Belfast. Featured this month are fresh spinach, mesclun mix, hearth baked breads, goat cheeses, beet greens, wooden spoons, preserves, meats, and other wonderful things.