james-in-lapine froze again chattered HappyDay, your 'What would Jesus do?' was off topic and is just fanning the flames. I know, cos every mention of Jesus incites unforgiving rage. It's the reason for His ministry and what He died for. Seriously, looks like my lil joke zoomed overhead. I'll explain. For some time I have wondered at the unbelievable cowardice of the librul haters. Aren't libruls historically the weak men already? Libruls are the lily livered, civil rights and free love if not feminist advocating, pot smoking back to the landers and conscientious objectors. They are the meek and mild bleeding hearts, like Jesus. You know, the intellectual and emotional conscience of society. So why are these gorilla headed neocons namecalling them? It's like a drunken wifebeater yelling "Tha b*tch got between me and my kids!" Talk about blaming the victim. Libruls are no threat to the rich, strong, and powerful who own everything and control the government and the military. Oh wait, they are. Love-ins stopped the Vietnam war. In a time of rampant overpopulation, lives were saved and military contractors lost money. Unforgivable. Today, the voice of the victim is the only voice that has any moral clout in American society. There is only one way for those in power to reclaim control over the hearts and minds of the populace. To silence the voice of the victim, they have to pretend to be even more pitiful victims themselves. This reminds me of the oil and land rich Muslim world resenting even the tiny corner lot that the Jews finally got back after a decade of suffering. Regarding Jesus, it's ironic, isn't it, that Hitler used Christian rhetoric to turn brainwashed Germans against Jews when Jesus Himself was a Jew? He was killed for being King of the Jews. In fact, Hitler was probably the illegitimate grandson of a wealthy Jew who may have molested Hitlers mother when she was a servant in their home. Isn't it also ironic that most neocons hate their fellow American libruls even more than Bin Laden? Divide and conquer. Don't think about it, just shut up and do as you're told. Well, to be fair, the terrorists are only shooting at the soldiers. A man can respect and even admire another warrior. But the Libruls might be saying bad things about the soldiers, and that is unforgivable. What bad things are they saying? Oh, bad things like stop the war, save tax dollars, bring our sons home. Horrible things like that. Unforgivable.

The problem I have with landscape fabric is when weeds intertwine their roots into the fabric, you can't get them out. You can pull them all you want, but those root pieces keep resprouting. You're basically stuck using an herbicide, which I don't do in my veggie garden. When I bought my house, our entire landscape was fabric with lava rocks on top. My wife and I both hate lava rocks, so for weeks, we put on gloves, and removed ALL of the rocks, and replaced them with mulch. It looks far better, and our landscape plants have thrives ever since. Anyway, with the pine bark mulch, any weeds you have should be quite easy to yank out. For my pathways, I use patio bricks to walk on. But, I don't garden in rows, but rather in blocks, so I divide my blocks with the brick paths. The block gardening makes for less wasted space, and it makes crop rotation a piece of cake. And about your tilling, if you have a good loamy soil, I don't see the need for tilling. I am forced to till in compost because of my clay soil, although it's not all THAT bad. Joe

I don't have the energy anymore to shred leaves. The mower bag filled up too quickly and leaf vacs take a lot of time. I would not leave them raked whole on the beds for the reasons mentioned above. Plus where I live they always blew into a corner which made things hard to clean up in spring. They will not break down over winter - you'll just have a soggy, heavy mess to clean up in the spring. I save as many as I can and compost them into a bin. You can buy or make a compost bin pretty cheaply. Then I wait for the leaves to break down (over a few seasons) and work them into the beds that way. I agree that shredded leaves compost better, but again, I'm not up for the task anymore. I try to garden the easiest way I can these days. They're a great nutrient, but you have to figure out the way that's easiest for you. It's not as simple as some would imply.

Hi Okieladybug, Welcome back! First of all, it depends on what you're starting out with. If you have already prepared your soil and amended it, you can lay down several thicknesses of newspaper or cardboard and put mulch on top and that will help a great deal in preventing weeds from sprouting. Then you put your mulch on top. The newspaper and/or cardboard prevents seeds from sprouting beneath them...or, if they sprout, they can't break through the layers of cardboard and paper and reach the light and grow. If weeds sprout in the mulch you put on top of the newspaper and/or cardboard, those materials keep their roots from reaching the soil beneath and make it simple for you to pull the shallowly-rooted weeds out of your mulch. If you are starting out with grass sod, weeds, etc. I refer you back to everything Mia said. You absolutely must remove all the bermuda grass stolons and runners, and if you have Johnson grass, the same thing is true. Otherwise, you'll be fighting a losing battle with them both throughout the garden season. If you had a year to kill before planting a new garden, you could put down a layer or two of thick black plastic (preferably 4 mm to 6 mm thick) and weigh down the edges so it won't blow away. Then you could wait for the black plastic plus the heat from the summer sun to smother out and kill the bermuda grass (if you have any) and to solarize the soil and kill the weed seeds. Then you'd amend the soil, adding plenty of organic matter. The organic matter helps in several ways: it breaks up densely compacted soil and makes it drain better, it leaves air pores in between particles of minerals and organic matter, and that is where the plant roots grow...in the open spaces. It also provides nutrition for the plants as the organic matter breaks down, and in the looser soil you will find it easier to plant, to harvest root crops and to pull out or dig out weeds. Once your soil is in good shape, then you put the mulch on top of it to keep it that way. As the mulch breaks down (which it does on a continual basis), it breaks down into humus/compost and further enriches the soil and feeds the plants. So, mulch not only helps keep soil moist and helps reduce the amount of weeds you have to deal with, but it also improves the soil on a perpetual basis. Remember that heat and moisture contribute to how quickly all organic matter, including mulch, decomposes, so mulching is not one of those areas where you do it once and it is done. It is a perpetual job. It also makes soil improvement a cinch over the years, with the mulch enriching the soil as it breaks down. I like to leave mulch on the beds over the winter so that weed seeds are less likely to sprout, but I do rake it back out of the way when it is time to sow seeds. In some beds where I grow herbs and flowers that self-sow seeds every year (chamomile, Laura Bush petunia, larkspur and poppy seeds germinate in my garden as early as December or early January some years) I rake back that mulch in December so the volunteers can sprout. On beds that will have transplants put into the ground later in the season (tomatoes, peppers and the like), I'll rake back the mulch only a couple of weeks before my targeted planting date so the soil can warm up more before I put the plants in the ground. After I plant, I rake the mulch back into place, but only a thin layer of about an inch to keep weed seeds from sprouting. I want for the soil to stay as warm as possible without it being so bare that weeds erupt everywhere. As spring goes on and the temperatures warm up not only the air temperatures but the soil temperatures, I continue to add mulch. My goal is to have 3 or 4" of mulch on each bed before the real summer heat arrives sometime in June. A thick layer of mulch can keep your soil 20 or more degrees cooler than bare soil that is exposed to full sun all day long. There are various forms of mulch. My favorite bottom layer in growing beds is cardboard and newspaper, and in the pathways I use a high-quality landscape fabric covered with hay, chopped or shredded leaves and grass clippings. On the beds, I use a variety of things. Because my garden is huge, I'd go broke buying mulch, so I try to use materials I can find here on our property. Sometimes some of my ranching neighbors give me old, spoiled hay, but you have to be careful with something like that because there are some herbicides sprayed on hayfields (and city parks and golf courses) that can persist and kill everything in your garden. Because of that, I use hay a lot less than I used to. Every time we mow (and we mow from 1 to 3 acres depending on the time of the year), we catch the grass clippings in our lawn mowers' grass catchers and add the clippings to the garden beds or pathways. I've done that the entire 15 years we've gardened here, and it has done more to improve the garden than anything else I've done. Using autumn leaves is just as beneficial, as long as you chop them up or shred them first so they are in small pieces that stick together and stay in place). Because the grass breaks down quickly, it continuously adds nutrients to the soil. I am in a pretty dry area, so generally can add grass clippings the same day the grass is cut. I add thin layers of a half-inch or less each week on top of the existing mulch. Spreading it thin like that keeps it from heating up and turning into a slimy mess. If I lived in an area that had heavier rainfall, I might have to let the grass clippings dry out a few days before adding them to the garden beds or pathways. When I have to buy mulch, I buy whatever is cheapest but is of the minimal quality I expect. Sometimes the cheapest mulch isn't the best....for example, some bags of cheap wood mulch are ground-up, chipped or shredded wood pallets or whiskey barrels (the smell of the wood is the giveaway). I prefer mixed hardwood mulch that contains a variety of wood sources. I think cedar looks nice and smells good, but used it for 3 or 4 years and couldn't tell it made any difference whatsoever in pest levels, which was a major disappointment. One thing I learned our first few years here (and we are out in the country) was that the eastern red cedar trees harbored tiny ticks that jumped out of the trees and landed on people and pets who got close to them. Once we took out all the cedar trees in our yard and anywhere close to our house and garden, all the ticks were gone and they've never come back. I was so excited by that. It did shake my faith in cedar being pest-repellent. Although it repels some pests, it harbors others. Buy whatever sort of mulch appeals to you and makes you happy. That could vary depending on what sort of soil you have and on how flat your garden plot is, or isn't. When I use wood mulch, it rarely is the top layer because it tends to float away since I garden on a sloping piece of property. If I have chopped/shredded autumn leaves or grass clippings on top of the wood, they pack down on top of it and help hold it in place. There are many forms of mulch. I use lots of nasturtiums, dwarf zinnias, ornamental sweet potatoes, chamomile, Laura Bush petunias (a very heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant petunia that is bred from petunias native to Texas and South America), dwarf marigolds and other herbs as a living mulch underneath taller plants. Even my watermelon plants are used as a living mulch beneath widely-spaced okra plants. You also can use clover and other low-growing plants as a living mulch. Normally I like to let the living mulch plants shade the ground under taller plants, but I'll still have an inch or two of mulch on the soil under the living mulch plants so they don't get invaded by weeds. In my corn-growing areas, I often grow vining variety of gourds, pumpkins and winter squash to serve as a living mulch underneath the corn plants. The ground also is mulched with hay or grass clippings to keep the weeds down, but it mainly is the shade of the dense squash plantings that keep the weeds to a minimum in the corn bed. Because my garden is very large, I employ various forms of mulch in various areas....depending on what is growing in each area, the quality of the soil in that area, the slope of the ground, etc. I try to tailor the mulch to what the area needs. My first few years I used pine bark mulch and worked it into the dense red clay at the end of each growing season. That helped a great deal to improve the tilth of my soil. It did mean I had to buy more mulch every year, but it was necessary at that point in the life of our garden because we started out mostly with very dense, very compacted, very red clay that was very fertile but that did not allow roots to grow freely and did not absorb moisture well. Nowadays, I just add grass clippings, hay and leaves when they are available. Using mulch will improve your garden is so many ways that I always am shocked my how many people don't use mulch in veggie gardens. One additional note about using hay: it will come full of weed seeds, so if you use hay, you always need a layer of something between the hay mulch and the soil so that the weed seeds cannot sprout in the ground right beneath the mulch. Keep in mind if you want to garden as organically as possible that you need to be very careful with the sources you use for organic matter that you bring onto your property and put in your garden. You have no idea what has been sprayed on trees or fed to them, for example, before they are chipped, shredded or ground up and turned into mulch. I avoid the use of municipal compost because (and this would vary from city to city and even from one batch to the next) they tend to have lots of items in there that I don't want in my garden. You'll often find shredded plastic, rocks, little pieces of aluminum cans, etc. If you use municipal compost, sometimes you can remove a lot of that unwanted junk by putting your compost throw a compost screen or sieve before you add it to your garden beds. My favorite way to mulch a new bed that I've just built (which means it has freshly-amended soil with good soil structure and tilth) is to put down a half-inch of home-made compost first (an inch would be better, but I cannot make enough compost to use that much on one bed at one time), then a layer of cardboard two thicknesses deep or newspaper 8-12 sheets of newsprint thick, then an inch of grass clippings, hay or chopped/shredded autumn leaves. This is for beds into which I'm transplanting plants. I cut holes in the newspaper or cardboard and put the plants in the ground. If I am sowing seeds, I sow the seeds and wait for them to germinate, and then mulch after the new plants are about 3" tall. It depends on the time of the year---in early spring, I wait for the plants to get 3" tall because if I don't, the little pest insects hide in the mulch and gobble up the plants at night. In hotter weather, I mulch after the little sprouts are just an inch or two tall. Mainly that's because the ground gets too hot if I leave it bare for very long. You have to adapt your use of mulch to the weather conditions at the time. I'd like to make a special note about corn. Right after corn seeds sprout, you have all these neat tidy rows of little green sprouts shining like a beacon of light in the rich, brown, loamy soil. So, what is the problem with that? Crows. Crows love corn. Crows will pull up your freshly sprouted corn plants so they can devour whatever is left of the corn seed. To get around that, after I sow corn seed in the ground, I immediately add about a half-inch to one inch of grass clippings. The green sprouts in the grass clippings (whether they are fresh green clippings or older straw-colored ones) blend in and merely look like young grass sprouting in a lawn of old grass (the mulch). Since I began mulching my corn beds at planting time with a thin layer of grass clippings, I no longer have to deal with crows pulling up corn plants. A note about freshly-sprouted bean plants and mulch: in my garden which tends to have heavy mulch most of the year, we have tons of pill bugs and sow bugs. They live in the soil, in the mulch, etc. and congregate alongside the wood boards that frame all my raised beds. While the pill bugs and sow bugs actually are decomposers who help break down organic matter like your mulch, they also will devour freshly sprouted bean plants like crazy in mid-spring. So, I do not mulch the bean plants until they are several inches tall. If I mulch them too soon, the pill bugs and sow bugs attracted to the mulch will devour the bean plants with days of them sprouting. Once the bean spouts are larger and taller, they are less appealing to the pill bugs and sow bugs. So, while mulch in general is wonderful and highly recommended, there also are some drawbacks to using the various kinds of mulch. In my specific location with my soil and my pests, the biggest drawback to mulching is the pill bugs and sow bugs. I also use Escar-Go! or Sluggo/Sluggo Plus in wet years to help control them. In hot, dry years, there usually is not enough moisture for the pill bug and sow bug population to get large enough to do much damage. I also prefer grass clippings, hay or straw over wood mulch in my veggie garden beds because the snakes that scare me in my garden (rattlesnakes and copperheads, although the sight of non-venomous snakes in the garden doesn't thrill me either) blend in too well with wood mulches in general. Because the grass clippings turn the same color as hay or straw, it is easier to find the snakes before they find me. I hope this helps. Mulch is always good, but it is even better when you can tailor it specifically to whatever needs you have and can manage it in a way that you get the benefits of having it, but without the accompanying pests that might come in with it. I have noticed that scorpions also like to reside in the bark mulch, so I am really cautious about touching bark mulch with a hand, even a gloved hand...I use a trowel or some other tool instead. Dawn