HOW DO I MULCH MY VEGETABLE GARDEN / WHAT IS MULCH?

What is mulch? Why do we need it? Why is it so important? Why do gardeners go on and on about it? What is it made from? What is it? My name's Emma and in this video I'm going to answer all of your mulching questions. Don't forget to click subscribe. Let's get into the video. Mulching is as simple as one, two, three. One, find a place where you want to mulch. Two, find your mulch. Three, mulch. Ultimately all mulching is is whacking on some organic material onto your raised beds or around your crops and then not digging it in. And that's it. It's that simple. Of course mulch doesn't have to be made from an organic material. You can mulch with a sheet of ground sheet, some plastic weave membrane, even a great big box of discarded Lego. Of course that wouldn't be very environmentally friendly so it's best to use organic material to mulch and here's why. So growing vegetables takes away a lot of goodness from our soil. Mulching is a really easy and effective way of putting all that goodness back into our soil ready for our next crop. So some good examples of organic material to mulch with include compost, wood chippings, manure but also cardboard. I love mulching with cardboard for two reasons. Firstly it's great at suppressing weeds because it literally smothers them. It blocks out the light, it blocks out all of their nutrients and it just kills them. And secondly worms love it. Don't ask me why but worms love this stuff. Honestly it attracts all the worms into your soil and the thing that we like about worms is their poo. So we want the worms to come eat as many things in the soil as they can and then poop it all out and it's the worm poo that's really valuable to the soil. So cardboard is just a great way of replenishing your beds. Just be sure to remove any sellotape or any stickers from your cardboard before putting it down. So here's a bed that's had lots and lots of vegetables in. I think it had broad beans, it also had some french beans, it had lots of nasturtiums growing in there and some rows of carrots as well but now you can see it's pretty much finished. So I don't plan on planting into this bed again until the spring which is about six or seven months away. So I'm going to really mulch it over and leave it all over the winter just to really rot down and do a lot of good to the soil basically. So this is a bed that I'm going to completely cover with cardboard. So I'm just going to place my cardboard straight over the bed, over all of the weeds. I'm not even going to bother hoeing over it or anything. The important thing to remember is that you don't leave any gaps in the cardboard because the weeds will get through. So cover the entire bed completely. So now that all our cardboard is down and covering the entire bed we are going to water it. Why I hear you ask? Good question! Well, watering the cardboard helps to break it down quicker. Also the worms love soggy cardboard so it's not just cardboard they like, they like it when it's really wet and soggy it will bring them all up from under the ground. So I'm going to water the whole cardboard now. Feels a bit weird, stick with it. So now that all of my cardboard is covering the entire bed and it's been watered I am going to whack over a great big bag of multi-purpose compost. If you've managed to make your own compost that's even better, whack that over the top. Now if you want to plant into this straight away you can. Roots can go through the cardboard so just whack in all your plants or your seeds and they will grow fine. I'm going to leave mine over the autumn winter and plant into it in the spring. So there we have it a bed ready for the spring time. So this has been mulched over in the autumn ready to be left over the winter months and planted in in the spring time. But like I said before mulching is the art of putting organic material onto your beds. You don't have to wait for your bed to be completely empty of vegetables before you mulch it. In fact mulch has lots of benefits when it's placed around existing growing plants. It suppresses weeds, it adds really good nutrients to the soil and it also is really good at water retention so retaining water which is particularly good if you're going to have a heat wave or if your beds dry out very very quickly. An important thing to remember is that mulch is designed to be thick so it's better to mulch a smaller area really thickly than to try and do a large area too thinly. So I tend to mulch in the autumn time once I've cleared some of my vegetable crops away because that's when the soil really needs replenishment. It needs some food, it needs some goodness put back into it so it's a great time just to mulch over whole beds. Some mulch is really good at deterring snails and slugs from getting to your plants like strulch is a type of mulch. It's also really good like I said a hundred times at suppressing weeds which is something that is really important at allotment plots and saves you a lot of time. This flower bed behind me here I am mulching with horse manure. Now when it comes to mulches manure is one of the best things you can put on your beds it's absolutely full of goodness it's really really rich, fantastic for your soil. However unlike other mulches like compost or cardboard or strulch which you can kind of get away with planting some seeds in or some plants in straight away, with horse manure you have to wait at least six months for it to rot down. If you plant your new seedlings or new plants into horse manure straight away it gets really really hot and it's going to burn all of those vulnerable roots. So horse manure is something that you need to plan ahead. I'm going to put it on now in the autumn time by the time it gets to the spring and I want to put in some nice flowers it's going to be well rotted down and it won't burn any of the roots. So autumn time is a great time for putting horse manure on or if you can just put it in a pile somewhere and wait for it to rot down and then use it and then you'll be able to grow into it straight away but it's up to you. Just don't plant into fresh horse poo because it will burn your plants and no one plant or animal wants to be burnt to death by poo. Another question I've heard quite a lot about mulching is can I use my old crops to mulch with so can I pull down my old crops let's say this old runner bean plant here which needs to come out soon you can just chop this up and put it straight onto the floor so this is called the chop and drop. It's kind of like making compost on your soil already so you're just going to chop these up put them down onto the ground and it's just going to rot down basically and decompose. Normally what I would normally do I would be inclined to put some multi-purpose compost over the top of it or if you make your own compost just whack some of that over the top of your chopped up your chopped up vegetables but yeah you can just chop this up and put it on the soil and that acts as a good organic mulch. So if you take anything away from this video it's these three things keep it organic, mulch in the autumn and spring or around new crops and make it thick. Those three things are the most important things to know about mulching it's also great to do before a plot inspection because your plot is going to look really really neat really clean and completely under control. I hope you found this video really helpful today if you have any questions drop them below in the comments and I will get back to you or somebody else in the gardening community will answer your question as well and I will see you again in my next video thanks for watching bye