Red Mulch & Silver Mulch

I had seen some things about plastic mulch so we started to do some research. There are a few gardening companies that sell red mulch, silver mulch, green mulch, etc.  Each has its own purpose. It's basically a sheet of plastic that you lay down in your garden to prevent weeds serve at least one other purpose. Red mulch is supposed to increase yield of tomatoes. Silver mulch is supposed to naturally repel certain insects (it's reflective, so I guess it confuses their little eyes?). Those are the two we decided to try this year. We planted our zucchini on the silver mulch because they were overgrown with weeds and eaten up by bugs last year. We planted tomatoes in the red mulch.

The issue with the plastic mulch is that it's not permeable, so you typically have to run soaker hoses underneath it to keep the plants watered.  On the way to work one day I thought, why don't we cut off the bottom of some two liters and put one (upside down) next to each of the plants. Kinda like those AuqaGlobe things. Jeff did it one better. He cut a hole in the middle of the "mulch" and dropped in a five gallon bucket with holes drilled in the bottom. This way we can add water to the bucket or it can collect rain water when it rains to water the veggies.

You can't see the tomatoes in the picture above... they are still pretty small since we started them from seeds. What you can see is our fast growing snow peas behind them!

We did have two nights of light frost last week, but everything seemed to hold up pretty well. And so far this week we've gotten some broccoli and quite a few strawberries out of the garden!