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Mulch Ado About Planting

Each spring, people flock to their gardens and start growing the most amazing things. Not me though. I can’t keep a plant alive for anything. I over water, under water, or just plain forget the darn plant all together. Tim and Drama King are the gardeners in our family. A few years ago we shared our first attempt at gardening with our surprise guest,  last year we discussed why organic plant food is better, and maybe next year we can talk about gardening supplies. But for this year, let’s focus on mulch.

potato plant surprise
Our first attempt started out great. Do you see our surprise guest?

Mulch is the “stuff” that you spread over the soil. It’s job is to help the plants grow by retaining water, enriching the soil, and hopefully suppressing weeds. We didn’t use mulch the first year and we failed miserably with our garden. Maybe that was because the prior residents kept a horse in the same area. We spent the next year working with our soil to bring it to a nice garden friendly state as the ground certainly wasn’t ready for any form of sustainable gardening when we first moved here.

A Nice Garden Without Mulch
This is what a mulch free garden would look like

For my friends in Florida, I’ve heard that it’s pretty tough to maintain a garden but thankfully Scotts Florida Select Natural Eucalyptus Mulch has come to your rescue. It’s sustainable, natural, effective, and best of all local. And it’s really easy to use; just spread it over your developing plants while avoiding tree trunks, house foundations and other wood structures. For the rest of us, Scotts Nature Scapes mulch provides the same easy application and comes in three colors; classic black, sierra red, and deep forest. See Florida gets Eucalyptus and the rest of us get pretty colors.

Organic Vegetable Garden
Ideally our garden would look like this

Disclosure: This post brought to you by Scotts Miracle-Gro. All opinions are 100% mine.

By Angelia Embler

Angi grew up in southern Arizona but now lives in central New Mexico with her husband, two sons and three dogs. She creates, she responds to Yoast support requests, and she loves to ramble on about anything. When not doing those, she can be found curled up with a good book or watching any one of her favorite TV shows, movies, or an American football game.

5 replies on “Mulch Ado About Planting”

I was all excited earlier this year about gardening using the ‘Back to Eden’ gardening method. You can read about it here. however shortly after planting it rained alot and now its so wet we are not having alot of luck with it, but your pictures above look like a dream to me 😉

I’m attempting to have a green thumb 🙂 So far, carrots and lettuce aren’t working out…and please don’t look at my skewampus rows…digging rows by hand will not come out straight, lol. I’ve never mulched, so I’ll have to look into that. We have horrible clay like soil here.

Tim did a whole battery of tests on the soil and spent multiple years with cover crops to nourish the soil with failed vegetables each year. This year we actually have some fantastic potatoes, shallots, onion and garlic that are doing pretty darn good. Tim grew up in an agricultural family and his grandfather had fields filled with asparagus, tomatoes, grapes, plums and more.

And Tim said don’t worry about straight rows. The acre fields around us are never straight and they use tractors to make their rows.

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