You've found the famous Dave's Garden website! Join this friendly global community that shares tips and ideas for home and gardens, along with seeds and plants!
Check out the DG homepage for a brief overview of what you'll find in this gardening mega-site.
Login
If you don't have an account yet, visit the registration page to sign up.
For our newly turned 18'x20' plot this spring, we bought a bale of bedding straw (cost about $4) and initially scattered about half of it to cover the paths as well as all the exposed ground once the seedlings emerged. We used the rest of the bale a few weeks ago to refresh the soil cover.
Now, I got this idea from a small gardening book that I practically read from cover to cover late last winter when SO1 said we really really *could* turn over ground for a veggie garden, and to start planning... which I did in earnest! :) I needed to start learning a little bit about gardening somewhere, and quickly, and this book fit the ticket in its simplicity for a newbie. BTW, the book was Backyard Vegetable Gardening by Hugh Wiberg, copyright 1971.
And this experiment has worked well for us! It helped retain moisture in the ground during a very dry July, restricted our sightings of slugs and their traces, and certainly minimized the amount of weeding we had to perform (as compared to our neighbor's garden that had fully exposed soil). Woo Hoo!
Does anyone else have experience (directly or not) with this technique? Did it work for you? What surprised you the next spring, good *OR* bad?
Curious minds want to know, as we plan on increasing our veggie garden space next year by at least 30% and are seriously thinking of repeating this same technique. :)
Thanks in advance!
Donna/TuttiFrutti
There are 71 replies. The replies of posts in this forum are viewable only by paid subscribers of Dave's Garden, and only subscribers can post new replies. We are a member supported website.
