It is truly becoming Summer here in Little Anse. We don’t get much of a Spring but we do seem to have awfully nice Summer and Autumn weather. This means that it has become warm and dry enough to begin applying a nice protective layer of mulch to our plantings. We use hay for this task – straw would be preferable but even hay is pretty scarce around here.
Bales of hay are reasonably easy to transport around the Garden and it pretty quickly breaks down into lovely black humus. Hay mulch has very good moisture retention (much less watering) and very good weed controlling properties – whenever we see a weed pop up we can simply smother it with another layer of hay-mulch. Much less work than hoeing or hand-pulling weeds and it turns our Garden paths into fabulous compost factories!
The trick with any mulch system – paper, wood chips, hay, straw, etc. is to ensure that it really is deep enough to smother the weeds. About six inches seems to do the trick.
Sowing drills of seeds is more practical before the season’s mulch is applied and you do want to remove last year’s mulch in the early Spring to allow the soil to warm up quickly. To add transplants to an already mulched bed you brush aside the mulch to create a nice planting hole.
Happy Mulching!
And now for some gratuitous shot of the prettiness of the purples of early July.
Don’t you just love Chive flowers? So so very pretty. We know we should cut them off to keep the chives fresh and usable but can never resist the pretty pretty little fireworks show!
Lovely Lupines!
Blue Flag Iris… a neat and well behaved transplant to the perennial border. Blue Flag does not appear to be at all invasive here in Cape Breton – unlike it’s sister plant the Yellow Flag and it makes a lovely border plant in any bed that has a reasonable moisture level. NIce.
It is bit funny to be writing about water-saving mulch on a day like today when the Pink Fairy has decided to apply almost all of the rain in the world on just the one day.
Soggy for sure.
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