When you’ve designed your permaculture garden, sustainable produce garden, vegetable patch – or whatever you want to call it – and rattled through your tool shed, digging out your spade (pun intended), mattock and garden fork – STOP!
This gardening project of yours is most likely going to take more than one day to create.
Please avoid the mistake so many aspiring gardeners are guilty of, and that’s pulling out the weeds, ripping out the grass, and then leaving the soil open to the elements for days – sometimes weeks – before you get around to planting something.
The plant life that covers your garden (yes, that includes the weeds) is nature’s way of protecting our precious commodity; the soil. Think of the plant life (and rocks and organic dead matter) as the Earth’s clothes. Taking away Earth’s clothing – poor naked big round thing – gives the wind and sun direct access to dry out the soil, killing organic matter and driving earthworms (your little garden helpers) further underground away from your proposed garden plot.
The best way to maintain soil health is to only remove the Earth’s clothes where you are sure to be planting that very day – re-clothing with a different fashion style. You may be going from weed and grass fashion to vegetable patch or herb fashion, with a quick change over between. I’m sure you personally don’t wear a set of clothes, strip off and wear nothing for several days (or weeks) and then put on another pair of clothes???
Sometimes a particular plant you plan to put in your garden requires ‘preparation’ of the soil. For example, Sweet Corn supposedly does better if you dig in manure and organic nitrogen and phosphorus rich fertiliser a few weeks before planting the corn. If you decide to do this, then cover the prepared soil to protect it until planting.
I dug up one garden bed, added compost and organic nitrogen-rich fertiliser, and then was unexpectedly inundated with work so I was unable to get back to my garden for two weeks. So I covered it in mulch (my preferred is Organic Sugar Cane Mulch) and left it. The mulch clothing protected the soil while I was away.
When I was able to get back, the soil was still pliable, damp (we’d had a couple of days rain throughout the two weeks) and now grows six healthy Round Red Eggplant Bushes and Nasturtiums, with mulch protection between each plant.
The lesson – keep our Earth clothed. I imagine you wouldn’t be too keen to strip off all of your own clothes and lay naked in the sun and wind for days. You would probably end up with dry, cracked, and hardened skin that water and moisturisers found hard to penetrate. What makes you think our Earth is any different?