Chips with Everything ... and Mulch Mulch More

The turkey survived and recovered. I have blocked the offending gap between door and fence panel so she can no longer poke her head through and get stuck.

Before I continue on the main subject, here's a parasol mushroom I happened across today. Incredibly by late afternoon it was withered up and gone.

And here's a lovely picture of Gerry with his head in some catnip.

The new chipper / shredder has proved so popular that I have hardly seen Sue. She has slowly chewed her way through piles of thorny hedge trimmings, prickly roses, willow cuttings... In fact if you stay in one place too long you are likely to be picked up and thrown down the chute!

We have plenty of use for the chippings.

Firstly there is the comfrey patch. Last year's duck destruction meant that for once the comfrey was outcompeted by the grass. It is just poking back through again so a thick layer of mulch chippings will redress the balance.

It won't be long before the comfrey comes through and shades out the grass.

The chippings will give it a helping hand though.

The perennial beds suffer from grass incursion too, so a good few wheelbarrowfuls have gone into there.

And finally I laid fabric protection down for the new willow holt but I used cheap stuff, mainly because I don't like the plastic membrane which leaves long threads of unbreakable plastic in the environment. However the new stuff is thin and the grass has already started poking through. It does half the job, but is really designed to take a mulch - which is exactly what most of it now has. A mixture of grass clippings - a most convenient way of disposing of these right at source - and wood chip has been deployed to make sure the willow cuttings get a good start in life.

In fact mulching is the name of the game this year. But it is important to carefully select what you use to cover the ground and smother the weeds.
For the blackcurrant bushes, it was the bedding from the goose stables since they require a heavy injection of nitrogen.

Blackberries appreciating a heavy feed

The chicken escape committee

have decided that the paths should be mulched

as well as the raspberry beds.

It's easier just to go along with them.

For the raspberries it is grass clippings. Again it is a handy place to empty the mower. The mulch smothers the weeds, especially the invading grass and rots down to feed the soil. It saves hours of weeding in between raspberry canes.

The last two mulches I mentioned, straw and grass clippings, are also ideal for slugs. If I used them on my vegetable patch there would be no vegetables left, even with the help of the duck squad. But soft fruits seem largely unaffected by slugs and the ducks will keep the numbers sufficiently down so this wont become a hotbed of terrorist slugs making nightly incursions into the neighbouring vegetables.

For the vegetables I am mulching instead with compost. The weed-smothering action should again save hours of hands and knees weeding while at the same time the worms, newly encouraged by my no-dig regime, incorporate this black gold into the soil. The mulch will conserve moisture too and feed the plants.

The only problem is producing sufficient quantities of compost to cover all the beds. so I make sure that every single compostable piece of waste makes it onto the heaps. More than that though, I am growing short rotation willow to chip and bulk up the compost heaps. The sheep appreciate stripping the leaves and bark first and the extra supplement they get from this is worth losing a little compost material.
I also have, at great expense, a hundred rhizomes of elephant grass arriving soon. This is a non-invasive variety which is grown commercially to feed biomass energy systems. But I will be using the biomass to bulk up the compost.

If all goes well, we will have mountains of compost. My only worry is that we have too much carbon content and not enough nitrogen content for the compost to rot down sufficiently quickly, but hopefully the weekly addition of old chicken bedding will solve that one.