There is plenty of time and energy to do heavy work while you are young. Now, this brings us to the vexing question of what do we mean by young and what do we mean by old? On our islands, the concept of age is different than in other places. Because we have so many older people, standards are higher here for claiming to be old.
I tuned sixty last summer and felt I had finally arrived as an adult. I felt sixty was the beginning of old. One of my very fit octogenarian friends was taking a walk with me when I announced that I was now old. She felt that being sixty, I was a mere giddy and unreliable girl. Another octogenarian friend explained that she felt old only begins after the age of seventy five. I have yet to ask my nonagenarian (people in their nineties) friend what she thinks.
Young is also different here. I had a lovely young woman tell me that she really was not a girl despite having just had a baby in her early forties. I explained that on Denman, a girl who is still fertile is considered little better than fetal herself.
Just let us agree that people who are brimming with energy and have few chronic injuries are to be classified as young. It is to these happy few that I wish to talk about mulch. Yes, mulch does attract slugs but that is just an example of the cussedness of life. Mulch is essential to cover the delicate and nutrient-poor soils we have. Mulch also nourishes the soil life, enriching the soil after being digested by innumerable tiny, hungry mouths. You can keep the explosion of slugs down with applications of organic slug bait available at the Hardware Store on Denman.
The largest soil organisms, the worms, dig tunnels in the soil allowing air and water to penetrate the soil readily. They also line these tunnels with their excrement in the form of worm castings. There is a really good experiment to do with children and gardeners. You get a large clear-plastic soda bottle and pour some damp soil in the top, shake it flat. Add some dried leaf matter, sand, clay, manure in layers. Now, add a few garden worms and cover the body of the soda bottle with dark paper.
Leave it in a cool, dark place such as the boot cupboard and take a look at it every two weeks and note the changes. The worms will work like the dickens to eat all the goodies. They will swim to the top and dive to the bottom. After a month or so, the entire contents of the soda bottle will be thoroughly mixed together.
This is what will happen in your garden if you mulch with organic matter such as stable waste, sand for clay gardens, seaweed which is such a boost to our mineral-poor soils, fallen leaves and compost. The worms will breed like mad in the protected soil with such a huge reserve of food. They will mix the soil and the amendments so you don’t have to.
A thick layer of mulch on top of a paper or cardboard layer will kill off any weeds except buttercup which seems to have supernatural powers of endurance. A layer of newspapers six deep should be enough to kill or really slow down most weeds. Paper feed bags and layers of cardboard will certainly kill off most weeds. When the buttercups pop a couple of leaves to the surface, you will find the soil so fluffy that it will be easy to pull these nasty weeds out. Even buttercup will perish if it is placed in a really hot compost pile.
The key to having a very fertile garden is to increase the amount of organic matter in the soil, no matter what sort of soil you are starting with. If you can mulch your garden beds hugely every year, when you are young, when you become old, you can get away with far smaller quantities of mulch which will make your old age much easier. You want to make your gardens look as if they are covered with a feather bed, ten inches tall of compost. It is not too late, nor too cold to do that now. My husband and I just spent part of today mulching our beds.
Another thing to do while you are still young is to build a covered porch for your house. We did and it made our house so much bigger. We have an outdoor bath and a kitchen under the porch. This is an excellent place to bake bread in the summer, take a bath looking at the beautiful sky and trees and to sit outside during a downpour or on a really hot day when you need some shade to be outside.
