Garden bed preparation continues this week with mulching. A very, very serious mulching. Watching this
video recently about a guy growing a food forest in his suburban lot in Arizona made me realize that perhaps I haven’t been taking mulch quite seriously enough. Jake, the guy in the video, has built up close to a foot thick layer of mulch spanning across his front and back yard where he’s successfully growing a plethora of plants, shrubs and trees in a climate classified as desert. It made me hopeful considering we get 4-5 times as much rain in central Texas.
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| Distributing hardwood mulch in the garden beds. I spread it out 4″ thick. |
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| After unloading all the hardwood mulch, we picked up two yards of cedar mulch. The cedar mulch will break down slower than the hardwood mulch. I’ll use it mostly for the pathways. |
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| I used what cardboard I had before mulching to help with weed suppression. |
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| Giving the new mulch a good soaking to help keep it in place. |
Related
How long does it take for cedar to mulch? when I used fresh pine sawdust on plants, they reacted badly. it was too acidic.
The cedar (juniper) mulch will take longer to break down than the hardwood mulch which is why I mostly used it for pathways. Mostly.
Also, our soil here is very alkaline so some acidity is very welcome.