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!

 

Garden Update, April 24th

POTATOES
I think I left out pictures of the potatoes last time. They are loving all the rain we've had and have taken off. Since our wonderful Tennessee ground is rocky and hard and mostly clay, we have to grow backyard potatoes a little differently. The last few years Jeff has built "barrels" out of hardware cloth (wire mesh). As the plant grows he covers it with more dirt. The potatoes grow up along the stem underground. We know they are ready when the plant on top wilts and dies off.  The last few years we have had several very small potatoes. This year looks like we'll get quite a few!


CUCUMBERS & ZUCCHINI
We got five cucumber plants and four zucchini plants in the ground yesterday. We used silver mulch for our zucchini to hopefully keep the bugs off of them this year and the weeds down. I'll post more on that later.

PEPPERS
Last week, Jeff planted four jalapeno and four bell pepper plants. We mainly grow these to make pepper jelly... yum.  They both freeze really well, too.

OTHER
Check out the "What We're Growing" page on the right column to see a list of what we're growing.