The Mad Hatter: to Alice - "You used to be much more...muchier.
You've lost your muchness."I garden based on the Biblical doctrine of Creation. Since God mulches everything, so do I. Many people today have lost their mulchness. They spend enormous amounts of energy carting away their mulch, then buy their mulch and various concoctions to make up for their lack of mulchness.
Trees cover the ground with a blanket of leaves. Every plant does the same. For some reason, people love to rake away that mulch and leave bare soil, which the wind blows away - unless kept in place by newly sprouting weeds.
Mulch has many advantages, and earthworms take advantage of those benefits. Mulch:
- Shades the soil. This frustrates weed growth and provides an umbrella for the light-hating earthworms. They can come up and do their work under the shade of mulch.
- Holds in moisture. Earthworms and plants need moisture, and harsh sunlight evaporates it away.
- Keeps the soil in place. The best soil is on top, so we call it topsoil. The wind turns it into dirt, blown away. Earthworms mix and grind soil ingredients, so soil left in place and worked by worms will become even better.
- Rots. Organic matter feeds worms and worms feed plants - ultimately us, just as we ultimately feed them. Mulch provides a constant supply of food, helping the vermicular population grow.
- Looks and smells good. Cocoa mulch leaves a chocolate smell at first. I love the smell of chocolate in the morning. It smells like...victory.
I have used tons of spoiled hay and leaves for mulch. The strange thing about using fast rotting mulch is the amount of organic material the soil can absorb.
I should have posted this in the fall. I pile up leaves on future gardening areas, so they can rot into the soil over the winter. If I want leaves to rot faster, I run them through the lawnmower and leave the fragments on the bare soil, with more layers on top.
I have used grass clippings on corn and vegetable gardens. There is never enough.
One of the benefits of mulch is watching starlings march through the garden, suddenly flipping over a leaf to reveal a bug. They look like pompous soldiers on patrol. Birds love a worm-and-bug-rich environment. People buy mealy worms to feed their bluebirds. Birdwatchers order them live, roasted, and sauteed in suet. My worms are free.
The ultimate goal of Creation gardening is humus soil. Humus is that miraculous end- product of compost, a miraculous complexity that improves sandy soil and clay alike.
Rich soil feels like jello, something I noticed when creating a garden area comprised of a pit of upside-down sod. It was 100% topsoil, grass, clay, and roots. Because of the nitrogen in the grass, it rotted fast. Every time I walked on that area, the soil wiggled under my feet.
I read that the prairie soil of the Midwest used to feel like gelatin when people jumped down from their wagons. That soil was created by centuries of tall prairie grass and their enormous root systems, on the spot composting, manured by endless herds of bison. One herd took three days on the hoof to pass an observer.
We have the best soil in the world because of that grass growing and dying, millions of miles of roots mining the soil for nutrients and dying, opportunistic earthworms thriving on this God-designed feast so we could live and prosper.
Some readers are saying to themselves, "But does he leave rose clippings and leaves around his bushes as they grow?" One principle of mulching is to take away disease bearing trash. Roses love to harbor blackspot, for example. If I find blackspot on leaves and trim them, the trash goes elsewhere. I mulch with wood and with garlic chives. Garlic chives provide a good ground cover and a gassy deterrent to insects. The garlic family is highly regarded for improving the health of plants and humans.
