Hi there Green Acres Community!
I hope you’ve all been staying warm in your homes, celebrating and eating delicious food over the past few weeks. The site’s been a little quiet as has the garden (we’ve all taken a break together). Most of the plots in the garden have officially gone to bed, however if you take a peek, the radishes, cabbage, collards, beets and carrots do still remain! We’re hoping they’ll grow to a nice mature size in our absence (though as of Monday, they still have a long way to go).
With the completion of the semester, we can now officially (and belatedly) announce that the mulching is complete!
A BIG thank you to:
The Rider News, who provided us with an entire year’s worth of newspapers.
Larry Toth and the lovely rest of facilities, who provided us with the mulch needed.
All the Bonners and volunteers who participated and/or donated cardboard.
Wise faculty who helped advise us.
So…mulching? Turns out, not a lot of people know about the reason behind it. To be honest, I didn’t know too much until I started researching. Mulching is a common gardening practice used to help with weed control and to honestly help beautify a space while distinguishing pathways. A large part is aesthetic, however also functional…by layering different materials, we essentially blocked out all sunshine to the weeds, invariably killing them.
Everyone, meet our beautiful dark-wood mulch. Hello, mulch. You will stop weeds! Go you!
Smooth it all out!
Look at those nice clean lines!
To do all this correctly, we embraced a little of our Italian roots, and used the lasagna method. I know…best name ever!
The video below illustrates what we did perfectly, though multiply the area to our 49×49 ft. garden. Lots of work!
It was about 40 degrees when I took these photos. I’m thinking that beautiful fog is heat?
Stay warm all!
—Jess
