Making Our Own Mulch. Global Warming & Hotter Weather using too much water!

With the weather being much hotter here now we have had to use a lot of shade cloth & mulch. Purchasing mulch is expensive these days, the reason for that can probably be blamed on Global Warming too! So we decided to make our own mulch, we have been cutting the reeds down at Cattail Pond whilst the water level is low (!), & carting it up to the gardens to use as mulch. Some we use as is where we can, the rest we run through or mulcher. It works well & makes great mulch.

Our New Three Sisters Garden. Hugelkultur.

This season we are trying a slightly new garden method, just to see if it works. This will be our three sisters garden, corn, beans & squash. This method of making a garden bed is known as Hugelkultur .

I will be making a video of this later when the crops are up, but right now this is as far as I have got. I dug a trench first & filled it with garden refuge, cut grass & weeds, heavier tree trimmings on top of that, some old garden edging logs that we have replaced, then the soil on top. I did add some chook manure before adding the soil to help break down the refuse.
When I started mounding the earth, I soon realised that I was not going to have enough soil to cover the highest logs. I did not want to bring more soil from elsewhere or use our compost that we needed for our other garden beds, so I removed two of the top logs.

The two pumpkins are volunteers from last year.