Not Mulching

The banner photo for this blog shows a whole lot of straw spread over a whole lot of newspaper and cardboard.

I don't like to weed. I know that hoeing or reaching down and yanking out unwanted plants can slide you into a calm, meditative state, but I'd rather do other things that relax me (swim, go for a bike ride, write), so I've long been a fan of mulching.

Organic gardening emphasizes the building up of soil with organic matter, and even if that argument never completely won me over (conventional farmers seem to keep pumping out high yields with 'degraded' soils), I do like the idea of avoiding the waste you would generate by using, say, black plastic to block out the weeds.

So, every winter and early spring I would gather my mulch. I'd hit the recycling bins for cardboard boxes and newspaper to spread over the ground, and, since everyone seems to agree that weathered paper and cardboard is pretty ugly, I got bales of straw to spread out on top - more organic matter, and a few more layers for weeds to have to punch through. But although paper waste is easy to come by in a city, straw is not.

Straw is itself a sort of waste product, basically the dried stems and leaves leftover from harvested grain. It doesn't have a lot of nutritional value for livestock (different than hay, which is grown as feed and is much more nutritious for herbivores), so it has historically been used for other purposes - soaking up animal waste, building, etc. As you can imagine, there is a lot of it out in the country, but there being no wheat or oat farmers in West Philly, it is harder to come by here.

So the first two years I sourced straw, I did it in the country. On my way back from hiking and herping trips I'd make sure to pass by a feed store and there buy the cheap straw they sell for horse bedding. Of course you can only fit so many bales in a Nissan Maxima, so it took me a few trips to get the 6-8 bales I calculated I'd need.

Then last year a friend pointed out a hole-in-the-wall feed store on Parkside and Belmont Ave. that caters to the local Black Cowboys who keep horses near there. It is a little surreal to walk into a ramshackle building in thoroughly urban W. Philly and ask a guy with a cowboy hat for straw, but I did it, and indeed I got a few moldy bales for a discount.

This year, though, the plastic buckets and the small raised beds are a piece of cake to weed by hand (and G claims she is happy to do the weeding), so I gave up the hunt.