Mulch, wind, damn rabbits, and hope (30 Mar. - 5 Apr.)

The Wind it Bloweth

Living on a moor at 210m, we are in a pretty windy spot. There are two stands of Scots pine* planted to the south west and west of our house which act as relatively effective wind breaks, but this week a cruel wind has been coming from the north and east. As a consequence, it hasn’t been pleasant to be out in the garden. Our new puppy, Humphrey, is particularly distressed by the situation. Weighing only 1kg, he could quite easily be whisked into the air and carried across the paddock by a strong gust.

In addition, we haven’t had any rain lately so the wind has had a really drying effect on the soil. I mulched the outdoor beds with decomposed beech leaves in prep for them being planted up in May, but in this wind the mulch has just desiccated and blown all over the garden and into the house.

*We just learned that it was tradition to plant Scots pine next to dwellings where travellers were welcome to stop. As we live in an old toll house on a drove road, this makes sense.

Mulch

So, I fully understand the purpose of mulching, but I’ve almost never been a successful mulcher. Organic gardeners and proponents of the no- dig approach keenly stress the need to cover any naked soil with ‘mulch’ in order to suppress weeds, prevent nutrients leaching from the soil, and to prevent the wind drying the soil out. My first gardening teacher always told me that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ - meaning that any naked soil will quickly be colonised by weeds trying to make the best use of the nutrients there, so it’s always best to mulch.

This is all well and good, but I’ve always struggled to understand where you’re meant to get all this mulch from?

The revered Charles Dowding assures his disciples that effective mulching is essential and easy, and recommends using compost, leaf mold, or even cardboard. While my beds are empty and waiting to be planted up, I would love to mulch with compost, but until I’m producing compost by the ton, that doesn’t seem feasible. In these ferocious winds, the idea of using cardboard is laughable. And my leaf mold mulch has been a messy failure, transforming into a sparse mulch for the entire lawn and the kitchen floor.

The only mulch I’ve found really effective in the past has been coffee sacks, which are easily moved, relatively impervious to wind, permeable to water, and not unattractive. However, getting hold of them right now is going to be a challenge. I have lots of plastic compost bags, but covering the soil with plastic seems counterproductive, will be unattractive and I don’t trust them not to get blown away. I wonder what other folk use?

Damn Rabbits

Last week I spent a considerable amount of time crawling under hedges and bashing my digits with a hammer in an attempt to rabbit proof the garden. Today, while walking around the lawn on the phone to the vet (poor Humph has eaten something horrid - we suspect a head of teasel seeds which are barbed and spiky) the most enormous rabbit lolloping brazenly across my path, looked me dead in the eye and took a slow nibble of the grass. I noticed it sported a few ‘tough-guy’ scars on its face. Resisting the urge to scare it off by screaming obscenities, I decided to follow it out the garden in order to learn it’s entrance/exit point.

Perhaps I had missed a spot in the fence? Perhaps there was a hole in the hedge I hadn’t seen?

Training Humph to deal with the rabbits.

Nope. The damn rabbit just jumped onto a knee high wall then straight over the 1.3 metre high rabbit fence. How the hell am I meant to keep him out? And why can’t the fox, who also clearly has disdain for my attempts to keep animals out, do something about the rabbit?! The rabbits live in profusion out in our paddock under the gorse bushes, and they take great delight in eating whatever I plant in the garden. Humph is far too small to do anything about the rabbits yet, so in the meantime I’m going to have to come up with some other deterrent.

Seeds of Hope

This week I have been buoyed by many of my seeds germinating in the polytunnel. My friend who advised patience in seed sowing was right. Most of the seeds I planted at the beginning of March are only just germinating now, while seeds I planted on the 19th and 23rd of March are already up.

The most hopeful of them all are the radish seeds (variety: French Breakfast). These little guys germinate within a few days and already have sturdy looking leaves on them. Because they’re so quick to germinate, I often use them to delineate the lines between crops.

At the moment we still have a few fresh vegetables to enjoy, but who knows what will happen with the supply chain in the next moth without teams of people to harvest our commercial salads and vegetables. Even though most of our polytunnel veg is still a month away from being harvestable, seeing these little vibrant green shoots is immensely cheering and doubly welcome at the moment.

My main concern now is keeping the various ravenous critters away from them. I haven’t caught a mouse in the tunnel for a week, but I fear this may just lull me into a false sense of security. I’m sure it’s not long before the slugs, snails, mice and various other beasties , get in and enjoy the buffet.