Using Mulch in your Food Garden

Now that it’s officially fall…it’s prime mulch time!

Ferns and leaves on the potato bed

Harvesting your summer crops, you may be looking bare, unprotected soil in your garden beds. And come springtime, those food-growing areas you cultivated all summer will quickly fill with weeds! 

That’s where mulch—organic material that you lay on top of your garden beds—comes in.

Mulch is one of the cornerstones of sustainable, chemical-free food gardening. 

In the growing season, mulching with leaves and other material from your garden will help suppress weeds, regulate soil temperatures, and keep more consistent moisture in your soil. 

Over the winter, mulch will protect your soil by reducing soil heaving from frost/thaw cycles…plus as the mulch breaks down, it builds your soil! 

Yesterday, I read a terrific article in the January ‘24 issue of Mother Earth News, “The Original World Wide Web”! It discussed the complex web of microbial life in the soil, and how organic material, applied to your soil, improves its fertility and in turn, crop production. 

The article was fairly technical, so a bit tricky to sum up. But long story short, as organic material breaks down, it feeds the microbes in your soil, which helps fertility in myriad ways.

One particularly fascinating aspect to this process was that these microbes aid in the “communication” plants do through a web of their root structures—which in turn helps your soil increase the nutrients for your crops! 

So…what to use for mulch?

Leaves: Hopefully you have a few deciduous trees around your yard, and in the fall, they’re on the ground for the taking! We have a beautiful small-leaved maple in our yard, which provides a large portion of leaves for mulch.

Other Foliage and Twigs: I also use a lot of brackenfern from the woods, which breaks down quickly. You can also use any foliage that doesn’t contain weed seeds. But…do not use fruit tree leaves or prunings, as they carry funguses. 

Crop Foliage: I’ve been using more of my harvested material as mulch, and it works great! Instead of doing the high maintenance chore of chopping up the material, I lay it on top of my beds. 

Besides leaves and ferns, here’s the crop material I’m using in the garden right now.

*Carrot tops

*Harvested pea pods

*Pea vines

*I’ve also saived my pea seeds, and just this week, planted as a sort of cover crop. The pea plants won’t grow much before the frost kills them, but they will provide some soil cover…plus their nitrogen-fixing roots will help the soil!

Empty pea pods to spread on top of the beds I just harvested

I utilize wood chips (not beauty bark) for mulching my blueberry shrubs. Wood chips from deciduous trees and firs look great on paths too. However, I don’t use cedar chips around my food crops. Cedar wood contains oils that have a slight herbicidal effect.

As for mulching after the first frost:

*Squash foliage. After I harvest the squash, when the frost hits,  I let all those abundant squash and cucumber leaves melt into the soil.

Parsnip foliage. I wait until the first killing frost to harvest parsnips, after the cold sweetens them up. Then I lay the cut tops on top of the bed!

I also top dress my tomato, squash and asparagus beds with well-composted chicken manure (originally mixed with wood chips). I’ve been rewarded with lush, healthy plants!

**Caution: like fruit leaves, do not use your spent tomato plants or potato plants as mulch—the foliage carries blights and funguses. On a similar note, do not discard spoiled tomatoes or potatoes in your compost pile. 

If you’d like more details about mulch, here’s another post… And for lots of wildlife stories around our homestead, stop in at my newsletter, This Little Farm Life!

Wasps in Charge—AKA, Never Have I Ever

Look closely at the bottom of the middle grape cluster

Last fall, we had a bad paper wasp infestation. As you see in the photo, they hit our grapes hard. 

What wasps do: they pierce the grape skins, then suck out the insides. The decomposing fruit attracts even more wasps, and fruit flies too, and the aroma soon spreads throughout the area!

Insects weren’t the only critter to sample the fruit…

Along came our neighborhood bear! It not only wiped out what was left of the grapes, but in the process, destroyed our grape arbor! 

John’s sturdy hand-built arbor was no match for the bear!

Well. This summer, our paper wasp population was very reduced. We had our usual wasp’s nests under the eaves of the shop, but nothing too scary. Not like last year, when the wasps even built nests inside our heat pump!

I’ve noticed garden pests often go in cycles, where you’ll have a whole lot of certain bugs one season, and far fewer the next. Still, this summer, my husband John and I decided to nip this issue in the bud. 

Our grapes often don’t ripen before the first frost, so we figured we could just let go of the crop this year—and I clipped off every last grape cluster. Problem solved, right?

I wish. 

A couple of weeks ago, smack in the middle of blueberry season, our area had three days of chilly, heavy rain. Very unusual for this time of year. While the Foothills climate is rainy Fall, Winter and Spring, our summers are warm and sunny, and a two-month drought is not unusual, especially in August and September.

Now the rain and chill would turn ripe strawberries to mush; you might see some mold on tougher caneberry varieties like marionberries. But blueberries are resilient, and will be okay even if you have temps in the 40s one day, and 90s a few days later.

Checking the blueberry patch the last cold, rainy day, I did notice the ripe berries seemed a little swollen, like they’d absorbed some of the rain, and the skins seemed a bit soft. I couldn’t wait for the sun to return and I could get back to picking!

Which leads to my late summer Never Have I Ever:

*Never Have I Ever: Worn long johns to bed in late August

*Never Have I Ever: Dressed in heavy winter cycling gear for a summer bikeride

*Never Have I Ever: Picked blueberries by camp lantern.

Are you seeing where this is going? That first warm day, out came the wasps!

At night, wasps don’t feed, as they do in the cold, they retreat to their nests. But the sun brought them out in droves…and into our blueberry patch, full of ripe berries!

Like they do with the grapes, wasps pierce blueberry skins, then chomp a hole in the berry and suck out the insides until just a husk is left.

They were hitting one shrub so hard I knew in a few hours there wouldn’t be one decent berry left to harvest

I picked for 15 minutes or so, but it was way too stressful, having all those wasps flying around me. I decided, new strategy. It was 80 degrees, but I pulled on a hoodie and long pants, and tried to pick that way.

Still too stressful! I could get stung on my face and hands. So I waited until dark, went inside, and grabbed our rechargeable lantern we keep for power outages. 

I felt sort of foolish, or maybe, how compulsive can you get, doing garden chores at night?

But at least I was able to pick berries in peace. 

I only picked by lantern-light that one night. It’s funny, that over the next few days, picking berries as usual in the daylight, I got more comfortable around the wasps. I would just be v-e-r-y careful to not grab a berry cluster with a wasps attached to it!

Besides, the wasps were kind of slow, and dare I say, a bit inebriated, feeding on decomposing fruit.

But as life often goes, I ran out of luck. Last night, some impatient wasp, annoyed by the human hand messing with its food, stung me on the knuckle.

It was sort of a light sting, not the full-on needle in your skin sensation. But it reminded me that I get crazy itching with stings. And after one Benedryl pill and some topical anesthetic especially for stings, I did wise up. I officially let go of the rest of the blueberries.

Every other summer, the blueberry harvest has been over when I say it’s over. This year, the wasps were in charge!

My September newsletter, “An Irish Border Collie & a Small But Mighty Frenemy” includes a bit more about the wasps, plus some fun dog stories…I hope you’ll take a look!