Mulching is an easy-to-implement technique that can drastically reduce the amount of time and energy that you’ll need to spend watering, weeding, and caring for your vegetable garden. You can read this blog post to know more about why you should start mulching your vegetable garden right away.
Grass clippings are ideal to be used as mulch in a vegetable garden. Grass clippings are freely available in most gardens and using it as mulch is an ideal way to add the nutrients back into your own garden.
Most vegetable plants are either annuals or perennials that are grown as annuals, which means that they are usually grown only for a few months. So, much used in a vegetable garden should be lightweight and should decompose easily.
Grass clippings are both lightweight and decompose easily while releasing nutrients into the soil. Grass clippings contain about 4% nitrogen, 2% potassium, and 1% phosphorus, which makes it a balanced source of nutrients. Grass clipping mulch can also keep in a lot of moisture while still allowing air exchange with the soil. This creates the correct conditions for soil organisms, such as earthworms and soil bacteria, to thrive, while providing a habitat for frogs, toads, and snails.
Step 1: Move the grass
If possible, move the grass before seeds appear so that grass seeds won’t be included in the mulch. Don’t use grass clippings from grass treated with weedicides. Use grass from your own garden as much as possible so that you don’t introduce any diseases, pests, or weeds into your garden.
Step 2: Dry grass clippings
Spread the grass clippings and dry them out in the sun for a few days before using them as mulch. Although you can use fresh grass clippings as mulch, it may give off a slight odor while decomposing.
In addition, once you dry the grass clippings you can easily store extras to be used for additional applications of mulch.
Step 3: Add a thin layer of grass clippings around your vegetable plants
Mulch must be applied in thin layers because thick layers can limit oxygen exchange and encourage harmful fungi and bacteria to grow because of the very damp conditions that they create. This may also be harmful to plants like tomatoes that don’t like too much dampness.
Exactly how much mulch should be applied will depend on the current weather conditions in your garden. Usually, half an inch thick application of grass clippings should be fine. You can experiment by adding slightly different thicknesses of grass clippings to find the most suitable for your vegetable garden.
Step 4: Reapply mulch when necessary
A reapplication of grass clippings will be necessary every few weeks or so, once the grass clippings have decomposed. This will be noticeable by the reduction in the thickness of the layer of mulch.
If you don’t reapply mulch quickly enough you may find weeds starting to grow. This is because weed seeds in the soil that were covered and didn’t have enough exposure to sunlight would now get as much sunlight as needed.
And that’s really all there is to mulch your vegetable garden with grass clippings. It’s really quite astonishing how easy it is to reduce the amount of time you’d need to spend caring for your vegetable garden by mulching.
If there are any extra grass clippings you can add them to a compost bin. Just make sure to add different types of other materials along with the grass clippings so that you get a mix of green and brown material.
Do you think you will or do you already use grass clippings as mulch in your vegetable garden? – Let us know in the comments below.