Damn, I was going to get some kind of great diary together by now, with intro photos of dying sunflowers and everything; all this in hopes of making a small effort to get across stuff about growing vegetables, etc., in the increasingly hot desert where I live.
Welp, timing is everything, and perfection less reliable. I have been thinking about all of this a lot since last week. Here's some thoughts.
I was originally going to write a series of diaries going from top to down. First: tall shade (Trees, shrubs, buildings, cliffs). Next, short shade (shrubs, companion planting). Then, more direct shade from non-living stuff (lathe, shade cloth, net.)
Then, I thought, I'd go on down to mulch. What is mulch? Stuff you put around the plants. I kept thinking about mulch, and not so much about stuff higher up.
Right now, where I am, I'm thinking about mulch a lot. Large bark chips are nice. I have them all over the yard; they are nice because they take a long time to rot. I retrieve them and move them around a lot.
I've noticed that there's plastic mulch chips for sale lately; I expect that's part of what's come from plastic recycling. I HATE plastic in my garden. Big bark pieces are nice; they have spaces in them to insulate from heat, they absorb moisture, and eventually they rot into the ground, but not too fast! This is important because in the desert nitrogen is a limiting factor with plant growth, and you should work your mulch decisions with that in mind.
Sometimes I like to mulch my newly-set plants with stuff like bark chips, and then put on some nice finished compost, or maybe soak it down with some manure tea, to make sure the carbon in the bark etc. won't steal nitrogen from the soil, nitrogen that your plants need to grow in the desert.
I'm currently working on a project digging a big ditch several feet west of my pecan tree, and I'm going to line it with waxed paper juice and milk cartons, flattened. I think they will decompose without sending anything toxic into the soil, and meanwhile hold the moisture some. It will leak, but that's good. The idea is to slow down the drainage, not stop it.
I could use rocks for this, or pieces of concrete. These are good things to use that will stay for a long time without changing. But I like the idea of using things I'd otherwise throw away, to meet a small purpose (moisture retention) that will then go away into the soil, pretty soon.
I also am using a lot of "yard trash" as mulch; stuff that doesn't have seeds, mostly. The soil here is pretty sad; I am working it up the best I can. But now that we are having temps up to 100 or so frequently, all shade is good shade.
I see my neighbors sometimes leaving bare dirt around their vegetables, or they plant them in rings around their trees. None of this works. It's best in the desert to think about where your shade may come from, get out from under the canopy of the trees, and work on protecting the soil, protecting the roots, thinking about what areas dry out the most, and if you want to plant there, protect these areas so they don't dry out so much.
I guess this is another prologue diary, but that's good! I need to work on my photos more anyway. I'll try to put another one up sometime this weekend.
Miep