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Sheet-mulching for a no-dig garden or for weed control

Sheet-mulching is a way of being able to grow plants in almost any situation, straight away and without the need for back-breaking work. It involves the creation of a new layer of soil on top of whatever you already have – which could be anything from a lawn to a concrete carpark. Sheet-mulching is an easy way of adding nutrients and humus to soil, and of controlling soil temperature.

Here’s a simple and quick explanation of how to lay a sheet-mulch. All you need is a friend (not essential, but more fun), a glass of wine/cup of tea and an afternoon…

1. Cut any vegetation/grass, but leave it where it falls and don’t take it away.
2. Water the area well. You may be worried about this stage because of current concern over water-shortage, but infact a sheet-mulched bed will need watering far less often than a traditional bed and not suffer so much in times of drought.
3. Now cover the area with opened out nespapers and cardboard. Cardboard needs to be one layer thick, but newspapers should be laid about eight sheets at a time. Make sure they all overlap each other by at least 15cm.
4. Chuck on top of this any organic matter you have to hand, kitchen scraps, weeds, etc
5. Then add a layer of grass clippings or hay.
6. On top of this add a good layer of compost (10 – 15 cm).
7. Finally add a thick layer of straw (15cm again).
8. You’re finished!

Clearly this is not going to be terribly hard work, even for a lazy gardener – which is, in my opinion, what we should all aspire to be. Once it’s done, you can go back at any point and plant up – to do this all you need to do is part the straw, make an hole/slit in the cardboard for the roots of your plant to go through, and bed-in your seedling or plant in the lovely compost.

Plants grown in this way do very well and don’t suffer so badly from harsh winters and water shortage.

There is, as far as I’m aware, only one drawback to sheet-mulchng – to any type of mulching infact. That is… slugs. You will find that not only has your mulch created a wondeful habitat for a huge range of useful organisms and micro-organisms in your soil, increased the worm population, regulated the soil temperature, built-up soils structure, retained moisture, reduced compaction; it has also turned your garden into a slug farm. Oh god, it’s a gardener’s nightmare!

Fear not, there are two solutions to this small side-affect:

• Set up regular beer traps in the areas you have mulched. A beer trap is simply a container (old cream pot, chipped mug, etc) which is sunk into the ground until its top is perfectly level with the surrounding soil, then filled (not quite to the brim) with beer. Now leave. Slugs who are out on the town looking for your prize veg will be irresistably drawn to the beer, fall in and die a happy death, pain free. Empty your trap regularly onto the compost heap and repeat the process. If kept up, you should not have any increased damage from slugs, infact you will probably have less than before.

• Some people actually enjoy going out to the garden as dusk falls, with a torch and a cup of tea, wandering up the rows of veg picking up the slugs. This is not my preferred method, but I know that lots of people do it so thought I’d better include it. Now, as you pick up these slugs you have two options available to you…

  • - Option one: throw the slugs into your neighbour’s garden (again, I am not condoning, I am reporting what I know to be common practice. This method is condoned, however, if your neighbour is the sort of person who grows leylandii).

  • - Option two: offer the slugs to your chickens (or ducks) as a lovely treat. This is what I do with mine. Don’t worry about cruelty to slugs, in a just world my chickens wouldn’t be fenced in and would be eating these slugs anyway.

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