Cutting corners | Keeping the grass tidy around each veggie bed got old pretty quick!
Where there’s mulch, there’s blackbirds | A digging hole left by a blackbird foraging for worms and insects for its babies.
Mulch better | After just 16 hours(!!!) of laying cardboard, shovelling, wheelbarrowing and hoeing, our first layer of mulch was complete.
Blades of glory | After a few weeks, with only half of our mulch in place, grass started poking out around our in-ground beds.
Because everything in our garden is an experiment, Paul and I try to make decisions that are cost-effective, flexible and - when possible - reversible. So when it came to setting up our veggie garden, we didn’t go for permanent (AKA: expensive) landscaping option.
Enter: mulch.
Mulch ticked a lot of boxes. It’s cost-effective (around $100 per cubic metre) and flexible in how it can be used.
We went with a heavier forest floor mulch, which costs a bit more but is better at staying put in Canterbury’s windy conditions. Here’s what we hoped our mulch would do:
To save money, we used bricks and sleepers left by the previous owners to make the boundary for our veggie garden.
While this was resourceful, the low boundary meant the mulch spilled over the edges when we first laid it down.
So we ended up spreading the mulch in two stages. We laid down half our mulch, then waited about five weeks for it to compact as we walked on it before adding the rest. Unfortunately, this caused a few issues:
Fixing it wasn’t the end of the world, but it meant an extra 8 hours of work for us both.
Lesson learned: higher boundaries and a single thick layer of mulch right from the start would’ve saved us a lot of effort!
Green lesson learned | With only half our mulch in place, the grass underneath continued to grow
Mulch has been an affordable way to create our first edible space. It helps define the veggie garden, keeping it separate from the rest of our paddock. Plus, now it’s down, it functions well.
We can walk around all our beds without tracking mud everywhere and it’s done an impressive job suppressing most of the grass and weeds underneath.
Go for a heavier mulch. Forest floor mulch works great in windy areas and doesn’t blow away.
Lay it thick. A layer of 6–10cm keeps weeds down and soil happy.
Blackbirds love mulch. Expect continuous visitors digging through it for bugs.
It’s not set-and-forget. Mulch breaks down over time, so you need to top it up.
By Sal at Sally Grows - 6th January 2025
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MEET SAL & PAUL → | Sally Grows: a paddock to plate adventure