Wow, what a great, sunny location for your garden! Regarding the tilling, you should do some research on lasagna gardening--you can kill a couple of birds with one stone on that one (adding good nutrient to a new garden, preventing the grass regrowing/growing through, and NO MORE TILLING!!!). Lasagna gardening is simply layering (lasagna style!) mulch and compostable materials into your garden until the garden itself is compost. Furthermore, it supposedly results in no new weeds (I am only just trying it out, container-style, this year for the first time), but that may depend upon the layers that you use and what's in them. It's probably too late to find some fall leaves, unless you have a local extension or agency that can point you to some--I have some for my composter, but I ain't shippin' 'em to ya' from Colorado!!! Besides, I need them for my own garden. ;-D Anyway, you have more than enough "mulch" answers here--very good, all of them. Points to remember: different things work for different people, different climates, and different end purposes. Maybe you don't mind pulling the occasional weed or two, in which case, straw or hay might not be a problem. You've gotten some great advice from some seasoned gardeners, here, and if I may make one more suggestion on your garden plan, check which things grow shorter than others, and put those all on the south side. Cukes, lettuce, radishes should all be to the south of peas, tomatoes, and most herbs (although, herbs should be south of the peas & 'maters). I would even suggest doing the herbs in pots that you can pull out come wintertime--there's nothing like fresh herbs in the deepest darkest pit of winter. One comment I must make, however, is that, according to the size/scale of your wheelbarrow, your plot doesn't look even close to large enough for what your plan shows--pumpkins can take over an entire garden, and tomatoes, well, they have a character all their own! If that's your house in the background, surely you won't be feeding the small army that 8 tomato plants will produce in your zone. Be sure to give enough room for everything, and if this is your first (or even second or third... or twenty-third!) attempt at gardening, it's common (a common "sickness" among gardeners?) to try to put to much into too small a space. Go with less-you'll be able to figure out what works and doesn't, what you'd try again and what you'd do differently. Do keep a journal of your dates, notes, etc (it doesn't have to be formal, but I do suggest using a non-water-soluble pen, since it's not uncommon for garden journals to get "watered" with the rest of the garden from time to time!) so you'll know what's what for next year. And yes, just like in sports, "there's always next year!" Welcome to gardening, and please post back to let us know how your garden turns out! You're very wise to plan in such detail!!!

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

If appearance is not a huge issue, you can make one out of old pallets, which you can usually scrounge up free. People I know of who have done this usually nail three pallets together to form three sides and then attach the fourth side, which is the front side, in a manner that allows it to be easily removed so they can turn the stuff in the pile. If appearance is an issue, you could still use the pallets, and plant a really fast growing vine, like morning glories, moonflowers, cypress vine, hyacinth beans, etc. They will grow up the outsides of the pallets and cover the whole thing in just a couple of months. Or, you can plant a perennial vine that would be slower growing, but permanent, and would perhaps make the bin area more attractive year-round. You'd want somthing that is not wildly invasive, so maybe something like American crossvine, passionflower, one of the hybird honeysuckles, or sweet autumn clematis. The clematis is a rampant grower, but blooms with lovely small scented white blossoms in August and is a delight to grow. If you want to be really adventurous, and get away with not turning the compost pile for months, create a Japanese tomato ring. I used the Japanese tomato rings (find instructions via google) for four years to enrich the ground where I now grow corn, beans, melons and pumpkins. My rings were large, about the size of one of those hard plastic kiddie wading pools you buy at Wal-Mart. I planted six tomato plants around each ring. I threw compost into the rings, including grass clippings and such (but NOT diseased tomato foliage) and the compost fed the tomato plants as it decomposed, and the tomato plants hid the compost pile. In the fall after the tomato plants were dead, I pulled them up. Then I unfastened the 4' tall woven-wire fencing that I had used to form the ring. (It was held together with big zip ties.) I raked out all the compost and tilled it into the ground in the fall. Then I reformed the ring and threw food scraps, leaves, etc. into it all winter. After several years of this, the soil was beautifully enriched and I was able to make vast quantities of compost with little effort while producing outrageous amounts of tomatoes. Do you belong to the Freecycle group for your city/region? If not, maybe you could give it a try. If you post that you are looking for materials to make a compost bin and then list what kinds of materials you are looking for, you might have someone in your area who is wanting to get rid of that same stuff. I am amazed at the kinds of things you see people giving away on freecycle. Have a great day and don't stress too much over it being deadline day. All that stress is bad for your health. :)

I don't think it would hurt anything. I use wood chips with cardboard underneath to keep the weed and grass growth down. Wood chips are a good mulch for anything, garden included, if you add lots of composted, old manure to the soil first to replace the nitrogen that the wood chips use up. Sometimes it depends on type of tree the wood shavings are from. Don't use walnut anywhere and use dolomite lime with pine/spruce unless you want the extra acid.