Monday garden update

We made a change this year to our gardening tactics... We have finally given up on keeping up with pine straw mulch. It's gorgeous. It's fantastic for the soil (if you have acid-loving plants). But in our climate (read: extreme heat and rain) and with all the aggressive soil microbes we've managed to get thriving in our garden soil - we couldn't seem to lay down new straw any faster than the old broke down and disappeared.

Common Yarrow growing happily.

We opted for a nice chocolate-brown shredded cypress mulch from a local gardening center. Delivered by the trailer-full - it's easier right from the start. The mulch is a gorgeous deep brown color when wet. The garden-center fellow warned us that some people don't like it much when it dries out as it tends to look like dirt. We don't mind. Dirt is good. As long as it doesn't look like cotton candy or astroturf - I'm fine with it.

We laid down a nice 4 inch layer throughout the flowerbeds back in January. We actually started running out somewhere in the backyard near the patio -- and really need another truckload to get everything mulched right... But lots and lots of rain delayed our plans before we were indefinitely stalled by incomprehensible insurance premium payments out of the blue.

Yarrow, fig, cannas, iris, taro, amaryllis, heather and other stuff.

The taro is a completely accidental ("natural") addition to the garden -

it apparently crept under our back fence and completely took over in less than a month.

My take on straw versus bark mulch? Well... The bark mulch is not quite as good at keeping the weeds away as the straw initially. The bark tends to pack down and the most persistent weeds find crevices through which to emerge. Straw does keep the weeds 100% away. That is - until it starts to break down... which is right away.

However, unlike straw - the bark mulch makes weeding supremely easy. Most of the weeds are actually growing in the mulch itself. Weeds rooted in nice soft loose mulch are very easy to uproot. This is good. A few minutes per few square yards with a hay fork and my weeding woes are taken care of for a week or so. Nice. With the straw mulch it was necessary to remove the straw -- pull out the weeds and then replace the straw. As you can imagine - this gets pretty tedious pretty fast and somewhere around June and 100 degrees - we let the weeds take over. I have high hopes for winning some of the weeding battles this summer.

We have tried year after year to start berries somewhere in the garden.

We finally found a nice native blackberry and voila -- results.

As noted above, we didn't actually get our mulch down until January. Not that mulch would have helped this winter... We lost several perennials this winter - including a couple of our new banana trees. Overall though - I'm really impressed with how many things came back - and are still coming back out there. Even more impressive - we don't seem to have any sprinkler system leaks despite the many hard freezes.

These guys sat around for years before they decided to do something.

Considering all of the other things we have to do around here on a given day - I have accepted that I can not have a manicured garden. To this end - I have been working for the last couple of years to 'naturalize' our flower beds. This is really just a fancy way of saying I'm not doing much of anything except providing the soil, water, and space for nature to take its course. I've been adding perennials each year and ever-so-patiently waiting for everything to get established and start to spread. Some of the pictures attached to this post show just how much this is happening in some areas - but we have a long way to go.

The Earthmaker

I was just out frolicking in the breezy backyard when I remembered something: I never got Dave to blog about his birthday present this year. Therefore, I will do it for him.

This is it. Earthmaker - the aerobic composter.

I spent a long time searching for a backyard composter since the demise of the ComposTumbler this past spring. The original plan was to simply replace the Tumbler with another until, after reading a few online reviews, realized that it was not Katrina that destroyed that unit afterall. We had assumed that when the rotating handle fell off from rust - it was a flood-related problem.. And I'm sure that accelerated the process. However, online reviews in areas not inundated by hurricanes complained of the same thing over relatively short periods of time. Not at all acceptable for a piece of equipment that can cost as much as $700.

Not only that - but we both started to realize that it was not the ComposTumbler that we had fallen in love with in the first place: It was composting. The Tumbler claims faster composting if you turn the crank handle every day... And that may even be true! However... We didn't always turn the handle every day. What happens when you don't turn the handle? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If I leave a pile of leaves in the back corner of the yard for 6 months - the bottom layer will start to compost. If I leave a pile of leaves in a ComposTumbler for 6 months - I get a pile of rotten leaves and a few million nasty insects.

We also had a problem overfilling our cute little backyard Tumbler... There are a lot of people in this house - we produce a lot of kitchen scraps. As for garden 'clippings' (doesn't that sound dainty?) -- we produce mountains of those.

I was looking for something that didn't cost $700 - didn't have any parts to rust - didn't require cranking once a day - would produce compost unattended if necessary - that kept out mice, rats, and curious toddlers, and would allow us to add materials pretty much continuously.

The Earthmaker is what I came up with. I r smart. We like it so far although we haven't had it long enough to produce any finished compost. Still -- I've been impressed with how fast the material added has broken down and the capacity is great (I'm saying this before the big fall garden clean-out.... We'll see what I think then). It looks good, has a small footprint, and makes people say "What the heck is that?" And it's from New Zealand.

Only problem - guessing from all the flyers packed in the box telling us what to do if we found broken parts upon unpacking (which we did) -- this thing has a tendency to get a little rattled in shipping. Fortunately - customer service is good and no major problems.

We'll be sure to follow-up here on the blog with our results in a few weeks.