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Transcript: Here is one of my favorite mulch combinations for garlic of all time. So last fall, we planted this beautiful German White garlic along with our regular to sow, and we then mulched it, immediately, we mulch it with these. Oh my gosh, you can barely even see them now, but it’s basically beautiful deciduous leaves that have we put through a chipper Shredder. And from there, we put like two, three inches of that immediately on top of the freshly mulched garlic freshly planted garlic. Then we put about six inches of straw. This happens to be right right here from an organic farm in the Finger Lakes. And that rye straw is on top of that deciduous leaf mulch.
Now what I love about that is that the deciduous leaves underneath have a lot of fertility, there really isn’t a lot of fertility in the straw. So there’s a lot of fertility in the deciduous leaf mulch, as that decomposes, it’s releasing and re mineralizing all of these different soil organisms that are releasing it unto this garlic, but that breaks down pretty quickly. Whereas the straw, tons of carbon, there’s some other nutrients in there too, but it’s mostly carbon, not a lot of nutrients. But that also means it doesn’t break down as quickly. So it’s going to maintain itself as a mulch, weed suppressant, absorbing and holding water, retaining much more so than the deciduous leaves so that combination of two inches of deciduous leaves, chopped chips shredded on the bottom, with six inches of straw on top — what a dream.
You can see there’s a few different seeds coming up through it. And at this point, you know, I can’t come in and hoe it, but I can just hand pull it. So one of the main disadvantages to mulching your garden is that you are totally committing to hand pulling every single weed. But if you mulch well, early and often you don’t have to weed that much.
So at this point, I’m actually going to be hand weeding. We’re getting right into the end of May, and I’m going to be going through hand weeding all of the little weeds coming up through our straw. And then I’m going to be putting on an additional six inches of straw just so I never ever have to weed this garlic again until we will be harvesting her in the middle of July.
So there you have it friends. My favorite strategy for mulching garlic, two inches of chopped chips, shredded deciduous leaves with six inches of straw on top. And then in the spring when this mulch is finally starting to compress and some weeds are coming up hand weeding and then bam, another five, six inches of straw.
So there you have it friends, the lasagna of my dreams, the layer cake of my ambitions. I hope that it makes your life more beautiful, more abundant, more manageable, more joyful and more delicious.
