Kitchen Garden Forum

According to my calculation a 10 cm i.e. 4 inch layer of any mulch on 1 square metre of bed to suppress weeds would take 100 litres of mulch. Can anybody check this, please.
If so that's an awful lot of money if you have to buy in decent material that isn't full of chickweed etc. seeds. If it isn't that deep then surely one would continually break through to the soil below when planting.
To do one of my polytunnels completely would need 60 times that.Even if you broke it up with generous cross-paths
You would still have over two-thirds or so.

The calculation
In cms
10x100x100=100,000cc or mL=100 litres per square metre.

Hello Allan

Your arithmetic seems fine to me.

Barney

Thanks for verification. In that case I am most unlikely to follow that route other than maybe for specials like some salads where the cost is justified by a rapid turnround e.g. like rocket, polycrss, pak choi.
Allan

Allan, just out of interest what sort of mulch were you thinking of using?
I imagine that for a commercial grower like you, you would buy in this stuff by the tonne or cubic metre and not the bag, like us backyard gardeners, so that would bring the price down considerably.

John

PS Calculation seems OK to me.

The best that I know of is called the local Muckers Mulch, a blend of horse manure and hedge cuttings composted. It's quite nutritious but even bulk price you don't chuck it around for no good reason. Over £2 for about 40 Litres, slightly cheaper by the load but a lot more work.IF I do anything on no-dig it is most likely to be with my own garden compost as available, possibly supplemented with used growbags and other used sterile composts. I can always apply nutrients as required.I am trying to keep my personal bias out of it and just get the possibilities in perspective. It is no good growing commercially if your costs exceed your revenue for long. For instance it would be hopeless growing potatoes this way just to sell them, Hereford is well supplied with potatoes at rock bottom prices.
Meanwhile we are gradually eliminating weeds manually with every season that passes and it is quite surprising how the polytunnel soil improves just by frequent cropping.
To understand my situation think of me not as a commercial grower but as a backgarden and allotment grower who also makes pin-money out of it. I ran several allotments for 22 years before getting my own ground.

our county council now composts green waste, im told they will deliver bulk lorry loads at a considerably better price than the bagged stuff. mind you with the current push for recycling i reckon they will soon be giving it away to get shot of it.,,

Allan, the council compost should be worth trying.
I did cost it out for our allotment site last year, but cannot find the figures now. I think it was about £7 per cubic metre onto your own lorry.
So if you have a pal with a lorry.....

With what us lot round here put into our green recycling bins (i.e. perennial couch, bindweed, dandelion heads, etc. etc.) I'd be somewhat nervous of 'having it back' in the form of compost !
or am I being completely stupid here ?

I think that if it is brown and crumbly and has gone through a professional recycling process the seeds and propogatable matter will be non existent?

Compo

Or are the weed roots/seeds still 'dormant' until they get back into a cosy growing environment/temperature with the light and air they want ? Mmm.... I'd need to be convinced....

We had a lorryload of municipal compost five years ago, which has proved very useful. Positively no weed seeds in it at all, nor roots of perennial weeds, just crumbly black stuff which has produced good crops, though it is better mixed with soil as otherwise the water tends to go through it quickly. The farmer who produced it took four years to produce the final product. It was much cheaper getting a lorryload of unsieved compost, than it would have been getting sieved compost, but it did have a lot of things in it that we had to remove on use, such as quite large root stumps which hadn't decayed, or the odd bit of plastic or orange string, and so on.
Alison.

I used Leatherhead compost for years, then in turn I got Hereford Greengrow which was all right for what we paid. Now the scheme has had a makeover and we can no longer get our own at bulk prices, the only way to buy it is in sealed fancy sacks (not recycled!) at £2 a time, at that price and quality, it lacks the bulky humus and is more like road sweepings, they will have to look elsewhere for their customers. Muckers Mulch is ready to use and living material, well worth the extra and delivered to the farm, in sacks if you want it.

Wellie

I share your concerns...our local Council have started fortnightly collections from the Allotment sites...this is to make their 'no bonfire' ruling more palatable.

Only last weekend I saw green bags full of bindweed roots being placed out for collection... we were all saying that Council compost was off the menu

ive used straw for the last 5 years,no problems at all.£6 for a large round bale delivered.i apply extra nitrogen springtime

I have a sheep farmer working our spare fields and he gave me a large pile of sheep manure. It developed a crust on the outside but was slimy in the middle but the latest report from OH is that has since broken down well so that should help a lot. We have had it stacked on polythene zheet and every time it rained we caught the brown liquid, the same with the muckers mulch so we have lots of manure water but I keep it off all edible tops.
Allan