A vegetable garden planted with the warm season tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peppers and melons four days before the final frost date. The lettuce, radish, spinach, sugar snap peas and broccoli have been up for about three weeks, growing slowly in the cool and surviving an icy winter blast.
And horror of horrors the whole thing is mulched with fresh from the tree trimmers truck, wood chips. The old wives tale is this will rob the soil of nitrogen. We'll see. No one is looking anemic at this point and no chemical fertilizers have been added.
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11 comments:
It's huuuge. I am green with envy.
It's the average last frost date. You develop a feel for these things, right.
I'm all for breaking taboos, but I'm a little concerned the woodchips will deplete your soil's most available nitrogen. Can you get your hands on a bag of alfalfa meal?
Hi Christopher, your plantings did show no sign of any kind of deficiency with yellowing leaves, but they were just planted that day. I have seen fresh mulch do that before, but it doesn't happen immediately. Maybe some well composted stuff, I like Black Kow in a bag, around each tomato and pepper with the mulch pulled away. You could do an experiment, feed some but not all to see what happens. It might also depend on the type of tree the chips came from, also. I agree with Chuck as being a taboo breaker myself, I like to dig and move bulbs when they are in full bloom so I can remember where they are and what else is blooming at the same time, it has never caused a problem. You are so close to the frost date now, just one day away, not a worry I would say. I just harvested our first sugar snap peas. Now how to eat them?
Frances
Christopher;
I have looked into the wood chips issue myself (since that's all I have, free), and the new "received wisdom" seems to be that the nitrogen uptake occurs only at the interface between the thin mulch layer at the soil surface and the microorganisms beneath, and therefore is insignificant as LONG AS the mulch remains only on the surface. Apparently, it is when the mulch material is actually mixed in with the soil that the nitrogen robbing occurs.
I am only parroting what I have read recently, but your plot will be an interesting experiment! I plan to go ahead and use my wood chips too!
bev
It is huge and going to get bigger. The section where some roses had been heeled in is going to be reclaimed for vegetables.
A Cow manure dressing is on the list for the veges. In Hawaii my normal bed making procedure was a lasagna style layer of cow manure or good compost, top by a 4 to 6 inch layer of wood chips and a sprinkle of balanced fertilizer. In twenty years I never had nitrogen troubles with this method. Exactly the opposite results occurred with explosive growth on mulched plants versus non-mulched.
I read something about the new conventional wisdom and wood chips recently Bev. I don't see how there can be that much, if any chemical difference between my fresh wood chips and the $200 load of double ground mulch I just spread at Client #1's. Undecomposed wood is undecomposed wood no matter how long it has been sitting around or how many times it has been through a grinder.
As far as I'm concerned, fresh mulch beats no mulch. And free is very good.
Can you get an organic liquid fertilizer to foliar feed the vegetables, Christopher? It's easy to find in Austin - don't know about NC.
Annie
I think the secret isn't so much what the mulch does, but how rich is the soil beneath? I think your garden will do just fine. You'll know what to do if the leaves start to look yellow.
I'll be planting my summer crops as soon as this rain let's up. Too wet to dig right now, even in the raised beds of my garden.
Carol, May Dreams Gardens
Carol is right, the soil itself is what is most important. The resident gardeners have been adding bagged compost and manure for decades and green manure cover crops every so often.
My approach will be to add a thick layer of wood chip mulch annually, depending on the decomposition rate and a sprinkle of granular fertilizer as needed. I am too lazy to mix and use foliar spray fertilizer. Some where down the road a compost bin needs to be setup. It's on the list.
Hello from a fellow NC gardener. I've learned a LOT about wives tales lately...hadn't heard that one! Love your blog, garden on!
Hi Melissa, thanks for stopping by. I need to spend some time checking out your NC blog. A quick look indicated I could get lost for a while there.
Ooh, I love taboo-breaking! Can't wait for your report on the results.
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