It's interesting how what works in one person's garden does not necessarily work in another's. I've tried plastic several times and never had satisfactory results. Don't get me wrong - I wanted to like it! I wanted it to work. Who wouldn't like the promise of less weeding, fewer pests, and increased yields? It just never seems to turn out that way for me. It had been several years since I used plastic, so I decided to try it again last year for all my warm season crops. Here are my observations based on MY garden (yours may be different): 1) Fairly easy to install. A bit tricky to get it tucked in nice and tight around the edges of the beds as is recommended, but it only needs to be done once. Overall, less work than other mulches. 2) Difficult to control moisture! I know one of the promises of plastic mulch is that it conserves water, but I found it difficult to keep the soil moist, despite adequate rainfall AND me sticking the hose under the plastic at least once each week. I'm sure a soaker hose would work better, but our water is extremely hard and full of iron, so it would foul up a soaker hose in no time flat. So at least once per week all summer, I would turn the hose to a moderate trickle and stick it under the plastic, positioning it between plants so as not to erode the soil around the roots. Move it every 15 minutes or so, when the soil was good and damp. My hope was that capillary action would help transport water around so plants did not have to be watered individually. Unfortunately, whenever I peeled back the mulch a few days later, the result was always the same... dry, dry DRY! 3) No apparent improvement with regard to pests. In fact, squash bugs were even worse last year. Not sure if this has anything to do with the plastic, but.. 4) No early ripening of fruits. In fact, tomatoes were later than ever. Then again, many gardeners in the Northeast reported this last year though, so I'm not blaming the plastic. My theory is that the heat wave we had in June sterilized the first round of blossoms, so we all had to wait until Round 2. 5) Black plastic definitely attracts snakes. This could be good or bad, depending on what variety of snakes we're talking about and how you feel about them. I saw them lounging on the plastic frequently and found numerous snake skins under the plastic at the end of the season. I can accept the snakes (in my case all harmless garters), but not being able to control (or easily monitor) moisture was a real problem for me. Again, your mileage may vary. This is just my experience.

As long as we are brainstorming--part of the problem is finding a way to transfer solar heat deeper into the ground faster and storing it during the cold night period- using the ground as storage to try to get a sort of thermal flywheel effect going to get through the cold night. My idea âÂÂonly half hatchedâ is this 1. Hammer sections of copper, aluminum, steel or whatever conductive pipe you have into the ground-exposed part painted black. 2. cover with a thick layer of your favorite mulch. 3. install a clear plastic cover over the pipes you drove into the ground----Variables to be considered are many--- a few are a) the spacing of pipes. b) the ratio of buried to above-ground c) what thickness of mulch is the most beneficial d) would 2 layers of plastic with an airspace between work better e) instead of pipes how about a L shaped piece of metal like an unassembled length of ductwork 8"x12" purchased from Menards or Lowes. They come in 2 L shaped pieces. Bury the long 12" side. Paint the exposed part black and bend it to an angle it to face the sun, f) would insulation buried alongside your test planting area improve heat retention. g) bury 8â side and angle 12â side to sun. The duct comes in many sizes 12âÂÂx 12â ��"4âÂÂx 16â etc. Benefits: cheap-easy to build and store -----towards spring and planting season, the benefits of the warmer ground and more direct sunlight might combine with this system to gain us a week or two. Any other insights as to other variables and/or âÂÂconsiderationsâ before I give this a try in the spring would be appreciated.

For a couple of years I had a garden spot away from my house, with no water supply available so if I wanted to supplement rainfall I had to haul gallon jugs of water. To make my watering efficient, when I planted my peppers & tomatoes in the spring, I dug down and buried empty gallon plastic jugs, one between each plant. I had poked 4-5 holes in the bottom of each, of course, and left the caps on until later in the summer. Once the weather warmed, and after a good soaking rain, I mulched the beds 4-6" deep with chopped leaves, being sure to cover the tops of the (so far empty and still capped) bottles to protect them from the sun since I had found that the plastic degrades and becomes brittle when exposed to the sun. (In previous years, just cultivating around the bottles inevitably resulted in my breaking the tops off by midsummer.) When the weather reached a point where I actually needed to water, I cleared the mulch away for the moment and poured a gallon of water into each buried bottle. I set the cap loosely back atop each bottle to keep the leaf debris from falling in and clogging the exit holes in the bottom, then pulled the mulch back up to protect the plastic. I did not care about how long it took for the bottle to empty-- it seemed like a gallon or two a week per plant was sufficient, and the best part is that by burying the bottles the water went right down to the root zone where it was most effective. As for using wall-o-waters, since I had gotten some free from a friend, I tried them last year with 3 really early tomato plants I started specifically to experiment with. While they survived a good bit of frosty weather, in the end the plants I had started weeks later and planted out a month after the first ones when the weather had warmed quickly caught up to the wall-o-water ones and all the tomatoes pretty much bloomed & set fruit at the same time & rate. So my conclusion is that it was satisfying to my eager gardener's soul to be out planting early, but it really made no difference in overall plant performance. I have found the same to be true with early plantings of such things as peas and salad crops, too. Early plantings may survive, but later plantings quickly catch up and may even surpass earlier ones that have been stressed by the weather.

I was an early advocate of covering the soil with organic mulches. By the mid to late 1970s, I would never intentionally not do so. Of course, many days have since passed, and I've had the opportunity to see two general trends take place. One is, what I call the annual mulching. Landscapes that get almost no reasonable care at all will nevertheless have great quantities of wood chips or bark spread around, on a yearly basis. That is, whether they need it or not. This has come to be seen by many as some kind of necessity. Even a bed of truly crap plants will have that minty freshness of new bark applied around them, even as not one person takes pruners in hand to rid the plant(s) of dead branches, etc. I'm sure you've all seen this. The second broad trend is what I call "woodchip gardens", plantings so sparsely designed that it seems the "designer's" intent was to showcase the mulch. This, my friends, is not landscaping, but some kind of monkey see-monkey do game. Then, as these incredibly overdone mulch layers are colonized by beneficial decay fungi, the entire thing begins to form a plate of impervious mycelium-colonized material. Good for placement in a compost heap, but of no value to the poor plants struggling to grow there. Still, I continue to believe in mulch, but not for its own sake, and not absent-mindedly replenished based on a calendar date or some equally meaningless point of data. And for those situations where one wishes to gain new recruits via volunteer plants showing up in the garden/planting, no mulch is best. My dear late grandmother-bless her soul-was an extremely competent and creative gardener all her life, but could not and would not allow for the ground to be covered. She actively and purposefully wanted the many hardy perennials, etc. to spread their progeny around, and she knew that for that, seed to soil contact was required. +oM