I’ve been away for the last ten days, and I feel as if I have abandoned my veg garden, although I did put in a number of measures to hopefully keep the soil moist and reasonably weed-free (more on that next week when I return to see how it all got on – I have a sneaky suspicion I will have lost my potatoes to blight as there were a few tell-tale brown patches on leaves just as I packed up for my trip!)
Whilst away, I’ve had the joy of seeing a few friends and chatting to them whilst wandering up and down the beds of their own veg gardens. It’s one of my favourite things to do during the summer – there is so much inspiration and advice to glean.
My own piece of advice right now, is to always listen with curiosity and an open mind. Too often, I find, we can be a little judgmental or dismissive of how other people do things in the garden, presuming that we know better because we read somewhere that you should only water in the evenings, or only water once a week, or water every single morning.
When we go into things with more of an open mind, there is so much to be learnt.
This week, one of my favourite things to have seen is a friend and her neighbour both using fresh grass clippings as a mulch on raised beds.
“Does it attract the slugs?” I asked, imagining that it would.
“I haven’t had any problems with slugs at all this year,” my friend said.
Indeed, her plants look relatively untouched by slugs, as do her neighbour’s.
If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know that I often recommend Strulch as a mulch – I buy it in, at vast expense, and cover beds with it. Grass clippings are free, though. And they may as well end up strewn around my veg plants rather than rotting away in a pile at the bottom of the garden.
You can see in the photo above as well that there’s a ring left bare around the base of the plant – I do this with Strulch too – and my neighbour was quick to let me know that that was vital, to leave that space. So I will.
There are things in the grass at home – shoots of bindweed, shoots of nettles, shoots of knotweed. I don’t know what will happen to those. Presumably they break down in the same way as the grass itself and it won’t matter that they’re mixed in with the clippings when I use it as a mulch. There’s only one way to find out really – to give it a go.
I won’t dive in and do the entire garden like this – it’s a case of trying it out on a single rasied bed in the first instance and seeing what happens. But it is definitely worth a try, and if it works, then that’s an excellent little tip to have learnt from this trip.