Re: Re: Mulch - cedar chipsII

In a message dated 8/7/01 12:26:58 PM Eastern Daylight Time, RYFigge@aol.com 
writes:

> 
>  Or chips in general.  Once upon a time  - as stories begin! - my daughter 
>  lived in R.I. and  it gets very cold there.  So because of that reason, or 
>  maybe she didn't know any  better at the time, she really mulched her 
irises 
>  
>   -   AND it worked fine!  Nobody in this region  had ever done such a 
thing 
>  and were horrified and advised against  it,

I mulched because I didn't want to weed.  I had been reading Ruth Stout's 
book(s) on no weed gardening. (She was Rex Stout's sister - he's the author 
of the Nero Wolfe mysteries)

We had a pine forest back of the house (which was on the western border of 
RI) and I observed that nothing grew under the pine trees.  So I sent the 
girls up into the woods with a wheelbarrow, and they raked and brought back 
pine needles which I put on the iris in big handfuls. 

In our location, the soil was very, very sandy, and also REALLY rocky.  I had 
a buried boulder sticking up in the front yard.  The iris were on a slope 
facing SE and got about as much sun as anywhere in my yard did.  I left the 
mulch on year round.

Our growing season was too short to grow any melons - we couldn't count on 
putting tomatoes in until after Memorial Day, and we got snow at least once 
in October.

And as mother says, the iris did  fine.

RosalieAnn, currently above the Potomac downstream of DC, where the iris are 
currently planted in an old well head and mulched with wood chips from downed 
tree limbs from that winter with a series of ice storms a couple of years ago 
or they are in the gravel bed in front of the oil tank for the furnace.

 

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