Mulching Your Container Garden

Mulching

Once your plants start growing you need to ensure that the soil stays healthy. Your nutrient rich soil is good for your crops but weeds soon realise its benefits too. Weeding is often the reason that so many would be gardeners give up. When you have a large plot with long rows and endless supplies of grass, dandelion, thistle or whatever else likes your garden it can be truly daunting and backbreaking to weed. But with the small pots and planters that I use it takes only a few seconds to weed each plant. If you plan to do five pots a day that will take about four to five minutes. If you add mulch to your pots that will help suppress the weeds and will give the added benefits of adding more nutrients to soil and conserving water. Win, win, win!

My favourite mulch is seaweed, as I live fairly close to the beach. I just take the dog for a walk and collect a few bags (recycling from the supermarket) of seaweed. It is rich in many of the trace elements that plants require, its free and its fun to spend time on the beach especially after a storm when much of the best weed has been washed up.

Not everyone lives close to the beach though. Lawn cuttings also make a good mulch. If you live near a sawmill that cuts untreated wood the sawdust is great for mulching. Do check that the wood is untreated though as there is some evidence that the chemicals used to preserve timber can be toxic to your plants and you. If you have pine trees nearby those unsightly piles of needles underneath the trees are the best mulch for strawberries. When you trim your hedges the cuttings can be used as mulch or as an addition to your compost. Autumn leaves can be used as mulch and if you run your lawnmower over them they will rot down much quicker and give up their nutrients to your crops. Coffee grounds can be used as a mulch but although they attract worms and provide lots of nitrogen they tend to form a hard crust when they get wet which can actually make it harder for the water to get to those precious roots. If you use them, and I do for the brassicas especially, make sure that you run your fingers through the crust regularly to allow air and water in.

The part of your soil that is often overlooked is the livestock. Although the soil is home to many unwanted insects and other invertebrates it can also be home to those that will benefit your food. If you are converting a vegetable patch from inorganic to organic practices you may well find that you get an explosion of unwanted bugs when you stop using the chemicals. The reason for this is that most pesticides are non-specific. That means that as well as killing the bugs that damage your crops they also kill those that prey on them. It takes a while for the ecosystem to rebalance. The predatory bugs will come back once the first flush of the nasties is in. But to begin with you may have to be out there with a torch picking off the slugs, snails and caterpillars by hand.

The other part of the livestock is the microbes that are essential to the health of your soil. Plenty of compost will ensure a ready supply of microbes. Something I have seen in lots of gardening books is the idea of ‘sterilizing your soil’. This idea is completely incompatible with organic gardening which aims to create a balanced ecosystem in order to ensure that as much nutrient as possible can get into the food.

There are many different products on the market which claim to be organic fertilisers and of course it is up to you if want to use these. Personally I like to use only the things I have made myself. I have two reasons for this. Firstly ‘organic’ has become a buzzword which to some simply means higher prices. While there are many reputable organic traders, there are also some whose practices are questionable to say the least. For example the other day I watched a documentary on a man who collected turkey manure from non-organic turkey farms, composted it and sold it as organic fertiliser. I’m not sure if this is within the bounds of organic practice but it seems reasonable that at least some of the antibiotics and steroids which can be fed to non-organic poultry would come through the process.

My second reason is also to do with turkeys. Like them when they are young I like to go cheap! (Sorry couldn’t resist that!). I haven’t spent a great deal of money on improving my soil. Compost comes from my heaps, seaweed from the beach, wormcast from my wormfarm, sand from the river, coffee grounds picked up free from the local coffee cart, and the only thing I pay for is horse manure at a dollar a bag. If you live near a stables, they will often have so much manure they will be happy to have you come and collect it free.

Just remember, gardening is inexact and you are trying to be eco-friendly. Use what you have, experiment and enjoy yourself.