No. I just weed the gardens, then mulch with compost. The worms do the rest of the work for me. Too many other things to do.

Yes. I have found that my plants do much better when I do this!

When you disturb the soil you bring up weed seeds....just mulch and leave it alone. When you turn the soil you disturb the roots, when you 'loosen the slil" youmake agood place for weeds to grow....pile on the organic mulch and walk away.
Linda C

Nope. I mulch and feed with compost, and I always dig an extra-large planting hole for new plants, but I don't otherwise tinker with the ground. I have sandy soil and a ton of earthworms, though; that helps.

Nope, just planting and weeding.
Do you have clay soil, by any chance? Most of my gardens are yellow clay base, and it takes a fair amount of organic matter and patience to garden in it. Keep weeding and mulching, and the worms will do the rest. I've always got two boxes of compost going. We generate a LOT of coffee grounds, and it seems to keep the worms busy and happy. Compost is a good thing no matter what kind of soil you have.
If your soil IS clay, stay off of it when it's wet. I don't even step in the beds while the soil is wet. It compacts it, and when it dries, it's hard as a brick. Heaven help me if I ever decide I need to dig in the pathway for any reason :)

Flowerluvr - funny you should mention staying off the wet clay like soil, because the only way I can really do much of anything in the soil is when it is damp. That's when it's reasonably workable. Otherwise it's pretty bad. I try to stay off it, but it's a challenge.

As stated already, I only top dress with compost every fall. It works itself in. After doing this for years, it's amazing how much my soil has improved and my problem with weeds is minimal.

Janice....I agree with what everyone else has said, walking or working wet soil will not be good for the structure of your soil. It compacts it, which is just the opposite of what you want to provide for your plants. If you have clay soil that you garden in then I would read up on the many ways you can improve clay soil.

I have clay soil, but it really isn't bad. Mine is workable with a pitchfork and might be a bit loamy. Sounds like yours is worse than mine. Just the same, I have followed lots of suggestions I have read to improve the soil because a lot of plants I want to grow enjoy good drainage. I have raised my main perennial bed by about 10 inches, with a rock edge. I added pavers at every six foot interval, to allow me somewhere to place my feet and get in and out of the bed without always walking on the soil or plants. We have added lots of compost and leaves and mulch. This arrangement seems to be working very well for us. Even in the veggie beds, we built wooden raised beds. In the veggie beds, I sow a cover crop and till that in at times, to improve the soil. Right now the soil in some of my veggie beds is wonderfully friable and dark with a lot of worms. We mulch it with hay and yesterday I went to plant a tomato plant and I could have scooped out a place for it with my hand it was so loose.

Last year, we created a new shade bed, by emptying the contents of a partially filled compost bin and layered leaves and grass clippings then mulched the whole thing, we planted right into it and this year, everything is growing tremendously. We don't plan on having to touch that soil again, but will just continue to add compost as a top dressing and mulch. This method is often called Lasagna Gardening or Sheet Composting. Reading up on those two subjects will give you a good explanation of the reasons/benefits for doing it and how to go about it.

It takes some time and effort to get your beds started off on the right foot, but you only have to do it once and it makes a really big difference in what your garden will produce.

This is my largest perennial bed. Not perfect, but very workable and it wasn't a huge project to create it. The second photo is of a close up of one portion of the border that shows the pavers that have been installed where needed. This is early in the year, when you can still see them. [g]

Hope this helps...
pm2

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Prairiemoon2 - Thanks for the tips and pix. Have you always used your own compost or bought ready made from a store?

Like your idea of adding stepping stones to eliminate the problem of walking on the dirt.

Actually, I disagree somewhat. All my beds are recently created out of clay soil and, even though I added a lot of OM when I first created them, it has been quickly consumed. For the first two years or so, I do mulch with horse manure, compost and shredded leaves but, when the opportunity presents itself, I also turn the decomposed mulch into the clay below as an additional amendment.

Over time, this is getting to be less and less necessary. The first beds I worked on now need only the mulch-and-forget treatment. The newer ones still seem to benefit from having the OM turned in occasionally.

So, I'm hearing that some use compost as the mulch (also referred to as "organic mulch?"), and some add compost then mulch, or "mulch and feed with compost"? Um. Pardon my confusion here. From a practical perspective, if using both, do you pull back the existing mulch, put down compost, then mulch again? At some point, aren't your plants neck-high in compost/mulch?

Janice...I was fortunate to have been introduced to gardening by someone who was an organic gardener. They had a wonderful garden so I had a great sample of how good a garden could look using organic methods. That was 25 yrs ago, when I was quite capable of digging and hauling and turning compost piles. Which we did at that point. For many years though, we have not been able to do the hard physical work of turning a compost bin, so now we collect our materials and allow it to break down on it's own. We have two black plastic bins with covers to allow us to collect kitchen scraps without allowing critters into it and we have one large bin that holds all our lawn clippings, fall leaves and garden refuse. We also have neighbor's who pass along their bagged leaves in the fall. They are much faster to break down and require less room to store them, if they are first chopped, so we run them over with the lawn mower before adding them to the compost bin.

The first year, you are gardening, when you don't have any collected materials, you can certainly purchase organic compost. It gets really expensive though, so if you are planning on any major construction of garden beds, it would certainly be worth it to wait until you have collected a sizeable amount of materials to accomplish that.

Last year, I had created a lot more garden beds and needed more ogranic materials than we had, so we bought composted cow manure and had it delivered and spread it over the top of all the garden beds in the fall. But that is supplemental after the beds had already been created with good preparation and the addition of organic matter where needed.

The stepping stones, were a pile of broken pieces that were left over from making a patio, but anything that you can get free or inexpensive would work too. Freecycle is a good place to look.

Good luck!

Thanks, Prairemoon. Although I've been gardening a long while, I have learned so much on this forum. The advice from everybody has been invaluable - even when there are differences of opinion on various techniques. I realize that I've been lax in terms of really adding organic materials to my garden beds(except for Mushroom compost) and plan to do that in the Fall especially.

Janice...join the club, we've all learned a lot on these forums! :-) I was also not using enough for awhile there but now I try to add as much as I can. It isn't easy to get enough materials for us. Our lot is only 1/4 acre.

I also have tried to look for plants that actually prefer clay soil when I am planning my beds.

Fall is a great time to add materials. You might also enjoy the Soil/Compost forum. Always some interesting techniques being discussed.

pm2

I will be the total rebel here... I don't turn soil and I don't mulch! I have heavy-ish clay soil. I weed if necessary, plant densely and use lots of self-seeders to get good soil coverage. Organic matter gets added without me needing to lug stuff back and forth to the compost heap. (I'm disabled so moving compost is an occasional event only and is done by DH.) Rather than cart off dead foliage to the compost heap in the fall and in the spring cart it all back again in the form of compost, I just let it stay on the ground (unless it is diseased or prone to disease - e.g. peony foliage is always removed.) The material composts itself into the soil just fine on its own! I grow feverfew as a filler plant and green manure - In mid-May I cut all the feverfew down by half and lay the cuttings on the ground - it keeps the fewerfew low and bushy, delays the flowering until the shasta daisies are ready too, and acts as mulch and compost for the soil. I think the scented foliage helps discourage a lot of bad bugs too because I rarely have much of a problem with them.

My garden does just fine with a whole lot less effort than many people expend!

ankh, I was the one who said "mulch and feed with compost." Funny; it made more sense inside my head, before I typed it out. :)

I mulch twice a year. In early summer (last week, in fact) I add a fresh layer of shredded bark mulch to my garden beds. Not a lot; maybe a couple inches of new stuff at most, and in some areas it's just enough to freshen up the look.

By the end of the season, it's begun breaking down into the soil. That's when I add winter mulch (primarily shredded leaves, but other matter that I've been composting throughout the year).

The next year, the bottom half of that mulch has started to break down and become part of the soil. I move off the top half when spring weather permits, leaving the more composted stuff behind. A couple months later, I put the new "pretty" bark mulch down again.

It really doesn't build up the beds' height, even though it might sound that way. But it sure does seem to enrich the soil.

I will second the use of fall leaves as mulch. Mine are Oaks, so I shred them up. Got the leaf shredder at an auction $15. Really does a nice job. Oaks are the best because they stay fairly stiff, even wet or in piles. Shredder really reduces the quantity, so I am actually wishing for more trees! I end up with about 5 bags each fall. I save a couple bags for spring re-mulching, making potting soil, but spread the others in fall. Leaves seem to really attract the worms!

I have used the leaves to totally cover my annual beds, then till under in spring. I have heavy clay also, and this aids in air spaces, again attracting worms to work the soil for me.

I tend to make a garden space with planting annuals, shredded leaf cover in fall, till leaves in (with a tiller!) for a couple years. Then I can put perennials in and expect them to do well. Annuals give nice burst of color all summer, can be changed every year, so I enjoy a bed or two of them.

I also have used the shredded wood as mulch, over newspaper. It works very well, especially if you are starting a new bed of perennials who are small. The newspaper keeps weeds down in bare spaces, wood shreds hold paper down. Again, add some wood shreds if it gets thin. In a couple years the plants are much larger, newspaper seems to disappear so I just keep adding shredded leaves or wood to keep weeds from rooting.

I have been working on composting my horse bedding, not a great success. It just sits in the wire bins, never really gets hot. Does reduce in size, since we were using straw bedding, but still looks like a pile of bedding. I spread the horse manure daily in the field, we don't have a manure pile elsewhere. These bins are a special spreader emptying chore, done now and then. I know bins needs turning, but there is always something else to do! I am thinking of resizing them so I can use the backhoe bucket. So at this point, the compost is not a going project for my perennials. However the roses and rhubarb plant beside the bin REALLY look nice! Vastly improved over their past years performance.

goodhors, I keep my shredded and some whole ones in big bins but don't turn them. They get wet and are heavy.

I've asked this question a couple places and gotten answers, but I'm still not sure. With your newspaper mulch, do you take out the ones with colored ink? I take out the shiny inserts, but am inclined to lay out the newspaper I've got ready which half the pages are colored ink on one side it seems. I was going to use leaves instead of wood chips because they are too expensive so I only use them for important plants and in front. Cypress takes a long time to break down.

And I step in my soil when I have to. Nothing is perfect around here. It'll get loosened up eventually because it's only the bare spots.

Woody...I am always trying to save effort, too. [g] Also dealing with physical limitations and DH and DS are doing the hauling and spreading. So tell me how you manage to just leave everything where it is? You do cut back the perennials at some point, I assume...fall or spring...and what do you do with the refuse? If leaves fall, you just leave them where they are? I do that in my shade beds, but usually unless I collect and chop them, the wind blows most of them out of the yard and I lose most of them.

pm2

PM2 - I don't cut anything other than the peonies back in the fall. Everything stays in place until spring. In the spring I cut down any of the tough, woody-ish stalks that are still upright. They go in the compost. If something is looking a bit smothered, I'll pull back the remains of last year's leaves away from the crown but otherwise leave it alone. (Most things are perfectly capable of coming up through last year's remains, so I rarely need to do anything...) During the growing season I deadhead and that material usually goes in the compost. The feverfew seedlings start growing immediately after the snow goes away and they rapidly cover/hide last year's debris. They do the same in the fall - i.e. seedling feverfew provide a green carpet around the dying foliage of the perennials. Some people consider feverfew a pest in the garden - I consider it essential! It makes a great groundcover spring and fall; a great green manure/mulch in mid-May when it gets cut back; it blooms with the daisies to provide an attractive small mirror of the large shastas; it becomes mulch again when it gets cut down after flowering,laid on the ground as mulch and also to ensure there are new seedlings coming along. Since the garden is (usually) snow-covered in winter, there is only a relatively short period when you see more dead foliage than green growth. In a milder area where there is a longer interval before and after snow cover - or where snow cover is largely absent - perhaps my approach would have less appeal. But I find the pattern of the paths running through the (brown) garden attractive. The dead foliage speaks to me with the promise of next year's garden, not with a lament for the loss of the current one. So I don't find the garden in it's 'resting period' to be ugly. A garden that has been stripped to bare soil in the fall looks far more forlorn to me than my 'messy' fall/winter garden!

Another important element in my gardening approach here has been the use of a mycorrhizal fungus supplement when I plant. The soil here was really poor. The major disturbances, backfill etc. that happened with the renovation and addition we did when we bought the place in 1999, didn't help any I'm sure! So I figured the soil needed all the help it could get. If you start out with healthy soil or are capable of adding lots of good compost, you probably don't need any supplements. But that wasn't the case here. I really do think they helped a lot with how well things have established and grown. Unfortunately it seems to be getting harder to find so I need a new source. But I think I've been adding enough over the last few years that the soil now likely has a thriving population, so I may be OK now to not supplement every time I plant.

With respect to fallen leaves - the biggest voulme is in the backyard. Anything that falls into the woodland garden beds there is left where it falls. Leaves on the lawn get chopped with the lawn mower and dumped into the woodland beds. The needles from the white pines largely fall into the beds. The ones on the woodland paths are raked back into the beds The ones that fall onto the lawn also end up being put in the beds. In the front, there are only a few deciduous trees. They are all small still so the leaves are not much of an issue but any on the lawn are added into the front beds. I would be happy to have another big tree's worth of leaves in the fall! The only disadvantage to leaves in the beds is that I have to keep a close watch for tree seedling appearing in the beds because there are a gazillion seed keys that end up there too! The green ash is currently dropping millions of them....

We only have 1/4 acre here but it is gardened pretty intensively. I have put a lot of work into things like paths and a good brick edging on the front beds, backed by a metal edge that keeps the grass out. Those sorts of things reduce or eliminate a lot of on-going maintenance. So, for the size of the garden, there is surprisingly little maintenance. Weeding is largely done by walking around the garden every day or two and pulling any I see. The biggest chore at this stage in the garden's life is deadheading in July! I am firmly of the opinion that the plants are happier to be largely left to grow in peace, with a bit of water now and then in bad dry spells.

Here is a link that might be useful: mycorrhizal fungus

No. I have three boys to raise - when would I have time?

I do like to take a cultivator to give air and water a chance to reach deeper into the soil. It also helps remove weeds as well. Other than that, I don't do any major digging.

Heather

Depends on the soil. We have anywhere from 2 to 4 inches of reasonable top soil in our garden. Beneath it is compacted silt, with rocks and boulders, ranging in size from small to massive, embedded withing it. An army of worms is going to take an eternity to drag organic materials down there.

In established beds, where the soil is in good condition, I just weed and mulch. On newly created beds, I dig, remove rocks and hard silt, ammend with lots of organics when building it, then dig overwintered mulch in about 2-3 inches deep every spring for the next 2-3 years. From previous experience, I know that's what it takes to improve the soil condition in as short a time as possible. Where I have left it to nature's will, it has taken at least 6-7 years.

Preparing a bed - note the sundry boulders.
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The biggest boulder of them all. The conractors didn't bother removing this one, which lies smack in front of our front door. How much does a boulder measuring 3 1/2 feet across, 4 1/2 feet long, and 3 feet deep weigh?
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I just weed and put down bark mulch. I'll have to buy compost for the back because it's pretty heavy soil back there. I guess I should have thought of that before I planted my 6 perennials and weeded and mulched. ugh

When I started this post I forgot to mention that I do leave the leaves from the trees on the clay bed I was referring to.
And, let most of the perennials overwinter "as is" to provide some visual interest during the down season. But, in the Spring, the ground is still very hard, so mixing the leaf remnants into the soil is not really possible since it only breaks up into lumps.

cactus_joe,

That bamboo fountain, surrounding rocks and
pebbles are absolutely beautiful. The best use was
made for that large boulder.

Would you mind telling us more about the rock on which
the water from the fountain is pouring on.
Is it a rock somehow hand or machine carved by someone?

Water always enhances the beauty of rocks and pebbles.
Thank you for sharing this photo.

Hi Woody... :-)

Thanks for sharing your low maintenance strategies. I have been doing some of the same things to some degree. My shade garden is always left to come up through whatever is already on the ground come spring. I rarely cut back anything in the Fall, but wait until the spring to do what needs it. Part of my problem is I like things to look neat and I like the plants in the beds to looked framed by either the soil or mulch. This aspect of my nature is an endless source of discomfort. [g] I am not sure whether I could live with feverfew or any other seedling carpeting the beds. I would love to see a photo of what yours looks like as the season wraps up.

I have not ever considered using Mycorrhizal Fungus though. I haven't known much about it, so thanks for the link, I will have to read up on it.

Our leaves collect in the back as well. We have neighboring Silver Maples and those leaves are fairly easy to break down. One neighbor has a London Plane tree and those leaves are huge and leathery and smother everything. Unfortunately, they are coming down in my full sun perennial garden and I have to get those out of there in the spring. At some point, I would like to just add all our leaves to the woodland beds, but since I am still creating beds, I really like the lasagna method and need a good amount of materials to create one. We have the same problem with the Maple Helicopters falling into the beds. Definitely have to keep an eye on them.

We have a 1/4 acre too. I love your idea of backing the brick with a metal edge. Where do you get your metal edge and how is it to work with on curves? I've tried plastic edging but I hate it. Last year, I started edging the grass with a deep groove and no edging and so far, it seems like less work than brick without a metal edging, which we have around a sitting area.

Keep up the good work, sounds like you have worked out a lot of strategies for keeping the work to a minimum and your Garden is lovely!

Cactus Joe....I love your Rock and water feature. That Japanese Maple is pruned so beautifully!

PM2 - I got the metal edge at a local landscape supply place. It's a Curve-Rite product but their website doesn't show the details. The link below seems to be showing the product I used. There were two different types at the place where I got mine. One of them had fairly wide breaks in the metal for where the support stakes go. I was afraid the grass would grow through those gaps so chose the type where the support stakes left no room for grass invasion. The metal edge was quite expensive ($20/8' where I got it and I put in several hundred feet!) The brick cost was less than the metal edge cost... The edge is sturdy but flexible so curves are easy. The strips join by sliding/telescoping together, which also makes the length adjustable. I only had to use the hack saw to cut them in a few places (e.g. to cut upsidedown Us out of it to fit over a couple of tree roots. It seems to be working quite well, although I'm keeping an eye on it to be sure that creeping grass and clover don't go over the top of it. The one disadvantage is that it certainly would complicate changing the shape of a bed!

I like the trench edge and that's what I used before. Renewing the edge a couple of times a year was just getting to be too much work. It took me from the end of May to late October last year to get all the brick edges completed (I work slow!) but, when I looked at all the edging this spring, I was very thankful that I did not have to do all that trenching - and hopefully will never need to do it again!

You might not like the look of my garden beds if you like things framed by mulch or soil. 'No bare ground' is my motto! :-)

Here is a link that might be useful: metal edging

The rock is native - it was exposed during excavation when the house was built. We are the second owners of this property. But the story was that the rock was too heavy to move - even for a large back-hoe. So, they just left it there. When they dug down to build the foundation and the basement, they found another boulder - this one apparently was so large (supposedly 10-15 feet across) that they would have had to use explosive charges to deal with it. They didn't - so they changed the house plan instead. That accounts for our living room being 2 1/2 feet higher than the rest of the floor plans! It actually worked out nicely that way. And it's nice to know that the house is sitting on a "rock solid" foundation!

It may look tranquil now, but building that small pond was quite a bit of work. Digging out a pond without shoring up the boulder would have caused a collapse in due course. So, I had to build a steel reinforced wall to support it.

We did have fun hand-picking all those other rocks and pebbles from the stone supply yard.

Unfortunately, the maple has since succumbed from a fungal infection. In it's place, now sits a container with black bamboo. But I really liked that maple.

Cactus Joe...what a shame you lost that Japanese Maple...it was perfect there. I imagine the Black Bamboo also looks great too. Amazing story about the rock under the foundation. I agree with you, having such a solid foundation under the house is reassuring. You did a great job picking out all the rocks and pebbles. Artistic arrangement.

Woody...I just went back to your post of garden photos trying to see where you have the metal/brick edging and couldn't see it peeking out in any of your photos. I see mulch and leaves and rocks...lol. You are right, if you only have to do the metal/brick edge once instead of edging every year, then it is worth it. I will have to consider that and maybe try it in a small area to see how it does first. Thanks for the link.

We did some work in the Veggie garden this morning, trying to finish up on our low maintenance strategies there. We created four 4x4 beds that are working out well so far. We planted a cover crop in them in the fall because I wasn't satisfied with the condition of the soil. We just got around to turning one of them in. It had gotten really high so it made more work for us, having to cut it down into smaller lengths to make it break down faster. But in a 4x4 space, it's not so bad. Then we took a couple of 5 gallon buckets of chopped leaves and mixed that in, we saved 4 buckets of straight soil to pour over the top of that when we were done turning it in and planted pole beans at the base of a 4 pole tripod and I had some asparagus seedlings that I am trying and those were planted in the center in a grid, since it will be a couple of years, before they will produce anything. Then added Nasturtiums and Basil around the sides, laid down one soaker hose in a circular pattern. One whole 50ft hose coiled around, just about covered the whole surface of the ground...lol. covered the whole thing with hay and that should do it for the season basically. We will also not have to do the cover crop again for at least 5 years or longer if we want. I plan on just mulching the top thickly with grass/chopped leaves/hay every year and that should keep the soil in good condition. At least that's the plan. We have learned to expect surprises though. [g]

Have two more beds to turn under and plant but we work slowly here too. :-) Maybe we will get one more done later today.

It always feels so good when you finish a project that has the potential for saving time and effort.

:-)

I never turn the soil in my perennial beds, unless you count digging new holes to put more plants in. I do toss all the spent potting soil I consume during the growing season all over the beds (runs to 5 or 6 bags, at least), never rake the beds (I call the leaves that fall on it compost in situ), casually throw pulled weeds and deadheaded flowers into the beds, and hurl my screened compost from three bins into the beds about every 3 years, Oh. Any pond "crud" from cleaning the pump filter or just clearing out the pond gets tossed into/onto the beds as well. I toss fertilizer (usually a high-nitrogen slow-release formulation, preferably organic, but in all honesty whatever comes to hand first in the garage) all over the place about every other year, preferably in early spring.

In about 2 or 3 years I do plan to purchase an electric chipper/shredder (I have an electric shredder--a glorified weedwacker in a bucket kind of thing, but it isn't all that useful) and happily munch up twigs and stems and leaves and hurl all of that on the beds as well. I haven't bought the machine yet because I have other priorities at the moment.

Lisa