Organic gardening: Mulch
The gardening year is always said to begin in the autumn but for the organic gardener it never stops.
There is always the living soil to be looked after, even though it would appear to have done its duty for the year now that the annual plants have started to die back, making the garden look as though it's preparing to hibernate. The "putting to bed'' of the garden that is carried out at this time of year is an important phase that will help things along during the following growing season.
While the recent autumn rain has been a blessing (it was pretty dry here for several weeks at the end of the summer), it got in the way of the seasonal clearing up. When working in a wet garden, it is absolutely essential to stay off the soil.
Paddling around on waterlogged ground does irrevocable damage and should be avoided at all costs. It creates compaction that will squeeze the very life out of the soil and leave it unable to breathe. Think about creating narrow borders or raised beds that can be worked from a path and so allow you to stay off the soil and carry on working through the wet.
When the clearing is finished, dead annuals removed and herbaceous plants cut back, it is a sound move to apply a thick layer of mulch to any bare soil. Conventional wisdom always had it that heavy soils, notably in the kitchen garden, should be dug over during the autumn to let the frost and winter weather break them down, and make them easier to work in the spring.
In so doing the larvae of harmful pests, such as the vine weevil or gooseberry sawfly or piles of juicy, translucent slug eggs might be exposed to predators such as robins and blackbirds.
I prefer to leave the soil undug over the winter to protect the life beneath the surface rather than bashing it about. If the soil has been mulched during the summer, remove any remnants to the compost heap and replace it with a fresh layer after a couple of days. During this time the birds can peck at careless grubs that were exposed during the removal of the mulch.
If you don't have organic matter for mulching and can't afford bagged material, you must improvise. There are any number of public spaces such as parks and playgrounds that could do with some help clearing up leaves - perfect for leaf mould.
Gutters get blocked and drains fill up while all those leaves could be gently rotting down in a cylindrical tube of chicken wire in the corner of your garden under the shelter of a tree or hedge, generally out of the way. Avoid putting leaves in bags or sacks as some books advise: the open tube is best.
It may be beyond most of us to sweep the streets for leaves but it is worth remembering that our gardens are almost always behind the clock on nutrition, so whatever we can lay our hands on we should be grateful for, especially if it is free. It is a tragedy to see all those lovely sycamore leaves go to waste at this time of year so get down to the local parks department and see how the land lies.
And if you live in the country, don't forget that farms are awash with manure that never gets returned to the soil. So ring a farmer tomorrow and put the garden to bed properly for winter under a thick blanket of mulch.
This article originally appeared in the Telegraph on 09/11/2007. link