Garden Progress

The garden has two beds fully planted. We've halved the middle bed - one side broccoli, one side lettuce. We did this just because of the number of lettuce and broccoli we had - just enough to split a bed between them. On this bed we've used the unprinted newsprint as the primary mulch, however, we've run into a slight problem.

The paper mulch seems to shrink and crinkle as a result of watering, causing stress - when a strong wind picks up the paper tends to tear. I've had bad luck finding bags of pine-straw from people's lawns recently - hopefully some pine straw will help keep the paper down.

In the bed closest to the house, we have interplanted beets and cabbage, with the cabbage lining the outside and beets in the middle. The idea is that the cabbage tends to grow more slowly, and the beets grow fast, so we can have a couple succession of beets in the middle before the cabbage get too large and need more space. We're going to leave this bed with traditional mulch (probably pine straw) - this many small plants would significantly weaken a long sheet of newsprint with so many holes required, causing more tear problems.

The third bed will be planted with sunflowers and tomatoes, which are ready to go into the ground. We have both black cherry and cherokee purple tomatoes.This bed will use the newprint mulch because the size of of the plants and the distance they need to be placed away from each other, the paper will have less holes and stay stronger through the growing season. To augment the health of the beds we've used mushroom compost and small amounts of wood ash.