sheet mulch

We still haven’t managed to make contact with our neighbor with a plow (in spite of a lovely two-people-on-one-bike trip around the neighborhood where we met a lot of other nice people), but we have a lot of hungry sprouts, so we’ve started expanding the existing garden beds.  Lewis had a giant piece of nice black plastic (I love that he’s always pulling these weird tools and things out of nowhere), so he put that down over a large grass patch to kill it.  Then he flattened our leftover moving boxes/boxes the tools came in and used them as sheet mulch.  He put them down in an overlapping pattern, sprayed them with the hose, and then both of us took turns hauling over composted horse manure from the pile behind the barn.  Sheet mulching generally has an extra step or two added to it, but we were running out of daylight, so that was our whole process.  We also took some of the non biodegradable mulch I bought (looks like black tarp with a backing of felt) and set that down over a section of grass.  We’ll see how it goes…

This whole sheet mulching project started while I was making soil blocks, and I’m finding that dividing up and doing separate jobs is working way better for me than both of us doing every job together.  Lewis easily slips into wanting to be the boss and I easily slip into not letting him, so everything went so much more smoothly and peacefully when we both had our separate projects we were “in charge” of with the other helping.  I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of negotiating roles as we move forward, but we’re already getting some great working habits and it’s only been a couple of weeks.