Sheet Mulching

Have you over wintered your garden yet? Sheet mulching or cover cropping your garden bed for the winter is one of the best things you can do for your garden. During our rainy winters, a lot of soil erosion happens. Sheet mulching or growing cover crop helps keep precious top soil where we want it. Additionally, after a whole season of growing, it's good to plant cover crops that will help bring nutrients back to the top soil. It is getting a bit late to plant a cover crop, but adding soil amendments, like gypsum and agricultural lime are great ideas. Then, you can sheet mulch right over the amendments.

We recently sheet mulched a new bed that we'll use to grow even more veggies this coming spring! Before sheet mulching, it's good to cut down the grass & weeds - no need to pull them up. Also, if you prefer clean edges around your new sheet mulched bed, dig a small v-shaped border. Then you're ready to go! Here are the layers in our sheet mulch:

layer 1. a weed barrier, often cardboard or newspaper (14 sheets)

layer 2. goat poop (or another sort of manure)

layer 3. leaves

layer 4. compost

layer 5. straw mulching, to hold in moisture and protect compost from astray weed seeds

We then reused some rocks from another part of the yard to border our new veggie bed. A quick and useful afternoon project.

Also, if you're interested and located in the Portland area, please consider taking our Wisdom Gardens survey. Wisdom Gardens is an initiative of Wisdom of the Elders, to provide gardening experiences and education to the urban Native community. The survey is to gather community feedback to help shape our program. Your voice is important and the survey is a short one. Thanks!
Happy Monday!