Q and A: garden mulching, watering, and using hoop houses

I see in the summer pics of your garden, you use mulch. Looks like hay, and doesn’t look really thick like the deep mulch system. Question: It looks like hay — I worry about hay leaving weed seeds. Some say if you do the deep mulch (like 6-8 inches) it will kill out the weed seeds. Yours don’t look that thick. Do you get weed seeds growing from the hay? Also, another reason I hesitate the method, is mice. I can see them having a hay day in that thick stuff. They ate my carrots one year, and that was with no mulch. Do you have a problem with the hay mulch? How thick is yours?

Also… I see in your book you are using hoop houses. Can you give more detail — like do you use them to just start things, then remove them later? Can you explain your reasoning? I really like info from you because you live in the real cold, just like we do. I always run out of time. Beginning of September this year it frosted. When you run out of season, do you do anything? I see your rows and garden is so big, so I’m assuming you don’t put a hoop house over it.

Is your only watering method the sprinkler? Do you have a problem with diseases because you use a sprinkler (keeps leaves wet)? I’m thinking about a sprinkler, its so much cheaper than soaker hoses all over.

Roxann Bagley
Williston, North Dakota

You’re so right about some hays “planting” seeds in a garden. When I was a young homesteader, I did just that and had a horrible grass/weed problem for three years following my mistake. Our hay is hay we cut ourselves. It’s reed canary grass that we cut when it is less than mature and has no seed heads. And as it grows so thick, no weeds are present in the stand of grass we cut early. We mulch pretty heavily (about 12 inches thick) which quickly packs down to about six inches. No, we have no weeds. Let me tell you what we do. We till our entire garden with either our Troy-bilt Horse tiller or a 3-point tractor mount tiller. Then we plant. Early crops are tilled again when they’re about six inches tall and hand weeded. The later crops are planted and when they are about six inches high, the whole garden is tilled and hand weeded between the plants. Then we mulch the whole works. NO more weeding all summer except a possible weak weed here and there. We have a good cat and two dogs and have never had trouble with mice or voles in our garden.

We have two hoop houses at present. We plant our transplanted peppers (that we start indoors) in the houses when the bad cold has passed but light frosts may still possible. The other one is for direct seeded muskmelons and watermelons, which are planted once the soil has warmed up quite a bit; usually in early June here. We leave them in all summer and fall until it freezes. If crops are really good and need a little longer, we’ll heat them with propane heaters overnight if freezing threatens. The rest of the garden is just covered with plastic tarps if frost looks possible. We listen to our weather radio every day! When a hard freeze is likely, we pick all the ripe (and some unripe, like tomatoes) and bring them inside. Green tomatoes will go ahead and ripen nicely if they haven’t been touched by frost.

We do use sprinklers as well as soaker hoses along our tomato rows and in our hoop houses. No, we have not had trouble with diseases because of the sprinklers. Our ground is sand and rock which is now nice black soil due to all of the rotted manure and compost we’ve tilled in over the years so drainage is perfect. When ground is more clay, it will hold the moisture, releasing it to the undersides of the plants and leaves, and we’ve found you get more disease that way. — Jackie