Sheet Mulch Demo

Expansion of the sheet mulch area,  which shows how to start.

First, save some plain corrugated cardboard boxes.  Newspapers will also serve, but they are more work to put down. Open up the cardboard and lay it flat on the ground. It helps if the ground foliage is mowed, even if it’s weeds.

Make sure the cardboard edges overlap onto the previous areas and each other, or weeds can — and will — poke through.  When thoroughly covered, the weeds become smothered.  Even though their roots remain, without leaves to nourish them, they will not be quite as strong.  Thus it is much easier to pull them.

This foundation, when covered thoroughly, will take about 6 months to break down.

For my second layer, I use coffee grounds.

I have also used goat manure, grass clippings, wilted plant trimmings.

For this area, I will collect leaves from the city leaf piles, and top with grass clippings when our lawn is mowed. Pile the leaves at least a foot deep. I have leaf piles available where I live, so I can do this in spring. Folks without leaves available all year will have to wait until fall.

That’s it for the sheet mulch demo!

 

From the ground up, with coffee

Sheet mulch covers a compacted area.

Last year (2013) five garden beds that I had built were smooshed into the ground by a 5-ton tractor.  We had to repair sewer lines from the house to the city line.  They were 60 years old and made of cardboard, if you can imagine that.  Orangeburg.

So the yard was dug up for the second time in 3 years, the new line put in — hooray! — and the soil so compacted that a shovel could not penetrate it.  I had great loamy soil there before. . .  😦

My husband and I took fence slabs from the previous (city) project, cut them up with a used Skilsaw, which had fortuitously been purchased at a neighbor’s yard sale.  We built raised beds that will probably fall apart in another year or two.  But that’s okay. . .

A truckload of soil filled those beds and wonderful vegetables grew there, which fed us much of the summer.  The rest went into the freezer.  It’s been wonderful to shop from my freezer all winter!

This year I am left with the still compacted section of the yard.  It went to weeds last year.  I am now putting down cardboard and covering it with coffee grounds.  I pick them up every week or so from a local coffee shop.  They are organically grown coffee beans, which makes me smile.

However, as the sole gardener, I am overwhelmed.  My most recent birthday was my 60th.  I have had ME / CFS for 25 years.  My strength is limited.  So is my energy.  What to do with this section of yard?

The spirit of place is guiding me to make it a refuge in summer.  It will be planted with native plants, and there is already an apple tree there.  Perhaps a comfortable bench at some point.

Right now, the area is still lots of weeds but also sheet mulch:  cardboard / newspaper, coffee grounds, leaves, grass clippings.

It’s a great project for the little old lady that I am becoming.

Echinacea planted from United Plant Saver seeds given me by my daughter.

Oh, did I forget to mention the red-twig dogwood?  the echinacea?  the comfrey that is flowering?  silly me. . . 🙂

Echinacea planted from seed last year — after the backhoe left.

Red twig dogwood, aka Osier dogwood

Red twig dogwood, with blooms.