I'm learning to identify which weeds are nutritious so I have been letting the weeds grow. I too have noticed that all the plants in the garden seem to do better when they have the weeds left around them and they need less watering. I was feeling a bit guilty about leaving the weeds, but I don't feel guilty about it now. thanks.
When your living mulch is things like chickweed and wood sorrel, you can manage them by treating them as crops ;) Both are edible for us ;) Or perhaps you have some chickens, who will be more than happy to eat your chickweed and return eggs.
Thanks Jesse. I’m looking more into living mulch and how it works, and working it into my garden. Very well explained. Jimmy. Scarborough UK (yes the one with the Fayre)
My garden has a ton of Ground Ivy that wants to do that, I just wish that I could get it to grow where it needs to be, next year we will have to come to a compromise.
What do you do about Poison Ivy and Virginia Creeper and other nasty weeds in a vegetable garden/raised bed? Can they be crowded out by planting a different live mulch like clover or something?
It's great you are covering the blank space with *something* rather than nothing. this is a mistake a lot of people make, but that space could be used to grow vegetables? Where are they? Youve got like 4 heads of lettuce in there, I eat that in 1 meal easily.
You're absolutely correct! Ideally your living mulch should be a crop too. That chickweed is edible, and good with eggs ironically. This was my dad's little back porch garden bed, so he did the planting. I just observed what was happening naturally, and how it was helping the garden, and wanted to share it.
So if I'm building a hugelkulture mound, is it okay if I set it up and just see what grows in the rich soil, so that I can plant to what's natural to the mound? I'm working on a design for a school food garden in north texas, and I want to design it so that it's pretty, edible, and very low maintenance.
When you have first built a garden and have bare soil, you get to choose what to populate the garden with. You can seed heavily with a cover crop like clover, and that will remain as the living mulch I am talking about in this video. Other plants are likely to come in on their own, and you can likely work with them in the same way, but It is good to get something like clover established because you know it is a good living mulch plant and it will help suppress other plants that might not be as easy to work with. If you just leave it to let the local stuff come up on its own, you could end up with some aggressive plant species taking over that makes it hard to get other plants established. The main point I am making with this video is you don't want to have any bare soil, so before pulling your weeds see if they can coexist with the garden plants. If it is spring when your hugekulture is ready to plant, you can just seed it with a mix of clover and all the vegetable seeds you would like to plant. Seed it randomly and let nature decide what grows where. Let some of the plants go to seed in the fall and they will plant themselves for next year. It is the "throwing some seeds at a mound and seeing what happens" gardening method, very easy and low maintenance, but it is going to look more like a meadow than a cleanly organized kitchen garden. beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
You can plant most things next to each other, with a few exceptions. Pick up a good companion planting book to learn what does and doesn't like to grow together. In general, your plants will not be competing for nutrients from the soil. If you have healthy soil with a lot of life in it, aka the soil food web, then everything will be fed what it needs naturally. However, plants will compete for light, so if you are using a living mulch, you have to chop it back at certain times to allow your other plants to receive the light they need
Is sow-thistle something I can plant vegetables/herbs to? Or, better question- what's a good resource to learn the chemical makeup of a plant so that I can make the right choices when putting plants together? I know what grows in well in my yard (sow thistle, dandelion, clover, wood sorrel, a sow thistle look alike, and a ton of pink flowers that stink), but I have no clue what to plant with them. So, for example, I just put in wild onion and wood sorrel, and I know from reading around that wood sorrel had a lot of oxalic acid (lemony taste), so it would make sense to find something that likes a lot of oxalic acid to put with it, right?
Graydon Buchleiter I think you maybe over thinking it bit. plant a variety of things, things that you like to eat, and see what does well. we could do hours and hours of research about what should and shouldnt like each other, and nature will surprise us anyway. experiment and observe.
In most cases, it's a myth that plants steal nutrients from each other. There is actually much more cooperation in nature than competition. Different plants fill different niches in the ecosystem, so as long as they aren't trying to fill the same niche they aren't competing. If you want to learn more about the incredible process by which plants get nutrients from the soil, google the "soil food web."
This is wrong !!! I densely plant my garden beds and very little chickweed or clover grows in my beds. I easily pull them out and make liquid fertiliser out of them. Densely planting your beds is the key !! You get more food then weeds!
"Nature will always win!" i love it! Thank you for making this. it is important people stop spraying and picking.
I'm learning to identify which weeds are nutritious so I have been letting the weeds grow. I too have noticed that all the plants in the garden seem to do better when they have the weeds left around them and they need less watering. I was feeling a bit guilty about leaving the weeds, but I don't feel guilty about it now. thanks.
When your living mulch is things like chickweed and wood sorrel, you can manage them by treating them as crops ;) Both are edible for us ;) Or perhaps you have some chickens, who will be more than happy to eat your chickweed and return eggs.
Thanks Jesse. I’m looking more into living mulch and how it works, and working it into my garden. Very well explained.
Jimmy. Scarborough UK (yes the one with the Fayre)
Excellent video, I’ve been pulling out weeds and using as mulch but this sounds great, will try it first thing in the morning🙂🌸
Very low stress for you and your soil ecology 👍
Chickweed is edible too!
My garden has a ton of Ground Ivy that wants to do that, I just wish that I could get it to grow where it needs to be, next year we will have to come to a compromise.
What do you do about Poison Ivy and Virginia Creeper and other nasty weeds in a vegetable garden/raised bed? Can they be crowded out by planting a different live mulch like clover or something?
Chickweed makes a good salad.
It's great you are covering the blank space with *something* rather than nothing. this is a mistake a lot of people make, but that space could be used to grow vegetables? Where are they? Youve got like 4 heads of lettuce in there, I eat that in 1 meal easily.
You're absolutely correct! Ideally your living mulch should be a crop too. That chickweed is edible, and good with eggs ironically. This was my dad's little back porch garden bed, so he did the planting. I just observed what was happening naturally, and how it was helping the garden, and wanted to share it.
So if I'm building a hugelkulture mound, is it okay if I set it up and just see what grows in the rich soil, so that I can plant to what's natural to the mound?
I'm working on a design for a school food garden in north texas, and I want to design it so that it's pretty, edible, and very low maintenance.
When you have first built a garden and have bare soil, you get to choose what to populate the garden with. You can seed heavily with a cover crop like clover, and that will remain as the living mulch I am talking about in this video. Other plants are likely to come in on their own, and you can likely work with them in the same way, but It is good to get something like clover established because you know it is a good living mulch plant and it will help suppress other plants that might not be as easy to work with. If you just leave it to let the local stuff come up on its own, you could end up with some aggressive plant species taking over that makes it hard to get other plants established. The main point I am making with this video is you don't want to have any bare soil, so before pulling your weeds see if they can coexist with the garden plants. If it is spring when your hugekulture is ready to plant, you can just seed it with a mix of clover and all the vegetable seeds you would like to plant. Seed it randomly and let nature decide what grows where. Let some of the plants go to seed in the fall and they will plant themselves for next year. It is the "throwing some seeds at a mound and seeing what happens" gardening method, very easy and low maintenance, but it is going to look more like a meadow than a cleanly organized kitchen garden. beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Is it okay to plant pepper plants in between the mulch is it going to compete with nutrients in the soil?
You can plant most things next to each other, with a few exceptions. Pick up a good companion planting book to learn what does and doesn't like to grow together. In general, your plants will not be competing for nutrients from the soil. If you have healthy soil with a lot of life in it, aka the soil food web, then everything will be fed what it needs naturally. However, plants will compete for light, so if you are using a living mulch, you have to chop it back at certain times to allow your other plants to receive the light they need
Is sow-thistle something I can plant vegetables/herbs to? Or, better question- what's a good resource to learn the chemical makeup of a plant so that I can make the right choices when putting plants together? I know what grows in well in my yard (sow thistle, dandelion, clover, wood sorrel, a sow thistle look alike, and a ton of pink flowers that stink), but I have no clue what to plant with them.
So, for example, I just put in wild onion and wood sorrel, and I know from reading around that wood sorrel had a lot of oxalic acid (lemony taste), so it would make sense to find something that likes a lot of oxalic acid to put with it, right?
Graydon Buchleiter I think you maybe over thinking it bit. plant a variety of things, things that you like to eat, and see what does well. we could do hours and hours of research about what should and shouldnt like each other, and nature will surprise us anyway. experiment and observe.
web.archive.org/web/20140303211632/www.oregonbd.org/class/accum.htm
Won’t it steal nutrients from the plant? Trying to learn.
In most cases, it's a myth that plants steal nutrients from each other. There is actually much more cooperation in nature than competition. Different plants fill different niches in the ecosystem, so as long as they aren't trying to fill the same niche they aren't competing. If you want to learn more about the incredible process by which plants get nutrients from the soil, google the "soil food web."
This is wrong !!! I densely plant my garden beds and very little chickweed or clover grows in my beds. I easily pull them out and make liquid fertiliser out of them. Densely planting your beds is the key !! You get more food then weeds!