Your Garden + Natural Mulches = Better Harvests

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Pepper plants do extremely well and set a good crop under a thick mulch of straw or dried hay.

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by BETTY BRINHART

When my parents migrated from the Ukrain region in Russia to the rich farm lands of Illinois during the late 1800's, they were already experienced organic mulchers...not from choice, but from extreme necessity.

Although the prevailing winds of the Ukrain could usually be depended upon to provide sufficient rainfall during the growing season, there were years when those winds completely failed the farmers and gardeners. The dry, scorching summers that followed could be just as cruel and devastating to plant life as the Sahara and crop failures and famine caused untold suffering among the inhabitants during the year that followed.

Although these simple Russians put their entire trust in God and Nature, they gradually realized that that was not enough to insure them a decent harvest every year ...and they set about devising some means of minimizing the destructive force of the droughts.

One spring, someone tried using dried meadow hay as a mulch to conserve soil moisture during the summer months. The idea worked ...and spread like wildfire. Soon everyone was cutting the lush, green grass in the meadows and along streams, drying it in the sun and storing it in neat stacks beside the family garden or orchard for use when needed.

When the vegetables were tall enough garden plots were heavily mulched with a 12-inch layer of the dried hay and more grass was thickly spread around fruit trees, berry plants and flowers. Soon, garden mulching had become a way of life, and - when one of the most severe droughts of all hit the Ukrain several years later - the mulched gardens came through with very little loss of production. Thus, my ancestors warded off a potentially-serious famine.

Having learned the hard way that good gardening and summer mulching go hand in hand, my mother gardened the same way in Illinois. Here, however, she ran into criticism from German-born neighbors who believed in 'clean' gardening. They didn't want any 'trash' (as they called my mother's mulch) in the aisles to spoil the beauty of their straight, well-cultivated vegetable rows.

Although the neighbors laughed at my mother's 'sloppy' gardening, she said nothing...but neither did she change her methods. Then, as sometimes happens in Illinois, a prolonged drought hit and not one drop of rain fell for two full months!

The German gardens withered and died but my mother's, which was heavily mulched with old hay, went on growing as usual and that fall she could often be seen strolling down the lane to one neighbor's house or another with a basket of carrots, potatoes, squash or apples. The neighbors, grateful for the fresh produce, apologized for laughing at Mother's gardening ideas and began asking questions about them. Before long, with my mother's help, almost the entire neighborhood turned into one gigantic organic garden!

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