Winter Mulch

The weather has started to turn to winter and finally time to mulch everything.  I like to wait until we have had a little snow and frost, in the hopes that most creatures have already found their winter homes, before I lay down bales of nice dry straw.  I mulched the garlic at home with a bale and a half per bed, the raspberries asparagus and strawberries with another 3 bales and then used 2 and a half bales to mulch the garlic at the community garden.  This will pretty much wrap up my posting for the winter, and hopefully I can get it back on track in the spring.

Mulched

I have been waiting for some cold weather before I mulched the garlic and the asparagus to reduce the chances of mice or other rodents making a home in it.  Last week was all in the negatives and it feels like winter is going to start coming, so I decided this was a good opportunity to put down the mulch.  I have a few barrels as well as a couple bushels of straw I collected in the summer.  The garlic received approximately 4-6” of straw loosely spread over top of it.    When mulching the bottom garlic bed I noticed that the red Russian and Gaia’s joy had both started to sprout.  It is kind of surprising but then again it does get full sun and it has been wet and warm since they were planted.

 

Using the remaining straw I mulched the top asparagus bed lightly.  Because most of it is new crowns, I'm going to spread some leaves on top later for a little extra protection.

 

After mulching I raked up the neighbors leaves from her maple tree to use on my pathways.  I ended up filling 4 bags of leaves and the remaining leaves were spread in the corner garlic bed.  I wanted to use these leaves as opposed to some I might get from the cottage or pick up on the side of the road because I know that they are clean, and don’t have any garbage or pesticides mixed in.  The ones I bagged I'm setting aside to use next summer as the existing leaves as compressed and deteriorate.