Sheet Mulching

I learned a new vocabulary word this weekend – permaculture.

A friend invited me to join her in doing some sheet mulching and I eagerly accepted, not even sure, at first, what that meant, except that it has to do with preparing a patch of nutrient-enriched soil, free of weeds, that will be easy for plant roots to penetrate, and which will not require tilling or digging come time to plant in the spring. It turns out this is a lot like the lasagna gardening that Teresa wrote about this spring.

I wasn’t sure where to do this in my yard; I had a spot picked out that I thought would get sun all day but as it turns out, it won’t, so I ended up doing it right in the middle of the spent summer garden. One advantage to this is that the area is already fenced (to keep the dogs away) and also it will kill off a bunch of the insidious weeds that have quite taken that area back over since everything was harvested. I’m thinking right now that I might finish off that side of the garden with sheet mulching, and then plant cereal rye in the other half as a winter cover crop, with the plans of harvesting the grain mid summer next year. That way, we’re using all the space that we have for something useful, without over-using and exhausting the soil. I ordered some cereal rye seed this morning. As far as the sheet mulched side of the summer garden space, I’m thinking right now that I might be able to plant some things there in the spring after all, as long as I’m not planting the same things that were there before. More on this later.

Anyway, my friend arrived with bales of straw (half for her and half for me), which we unloaded out of a borrowed pickup truck into my back yard. Then we set out on our collection adventure. The first stop was to bag up dead leaves from a donor’s yard. We collected 4 big bags; two for me and two for her. Then we headed out to get the manure. We went to a local horse farm that was happy to have us fill up the back of the pickup truck and haul it away. It had actually been sitting out in a pile for some time. It was pretty much already composted, which was nice – no smell.

When we got back to my place we did the following:

1. Put down a thick layer of cardboard and newspaper as a weed barrier.
2. Wet it down.
3. Put a layer of manure on top of this a couple inches thick.
4. Put a layer of dead leaves a couple inches thick.
5. Covered the whole thing with a thick layer of straw.

And that’s it! Apparently now I just wait, and let nature do its work. Come spring I’ll have a nice spot of rich, workable fertile soil for planting. I’m going to finish up that half of the garden in this fashion and we’ll see what happens!

Stay tuned for the sowing of my first cover crop…