Black Plastic Mulch

Something new for the garden this year: black plastic mulch.

We are hoping that this will be an answer to a problem:

• Gauchos are not gardeners, as I've said before ...nor do they have any interest in becoming gardeners.
• My Missus and I are not more lazy than most people ...but we are not any LESS lazy than yer average couple.
• We also leave the ranch for to take care of bidness in the Big City for about a week every 5.
• What's that spell?  WEEDS.

Add to that: a garden that is bigger than last year.  Within a stout Argentine cattle fence is about 60x100 feet of tillable area ...hope you can make that out from the below photo.  The scruffy area surrounded by the nibbled-clean pasture is our garden.  In the far-right corner is the beginnings of our plastic-sheeting greenhouse/coldframe for germinating plants.

The method I've come up with this year is a synthesis of what I did last year ...plus an amalgam of "square-foot gardening" and "raised-bed gardening" ...and takes into consideration my decision not to buy a big honking Husquavarna roto-tiller.

Under that lumpy black plastic cover at the top are 11 tomato "beds" of the type that I dug to great success last year.  Each tomato bed is for one plant ...and is a hole about the size of a 5 gallon bucket.  In those "buckets," the soil is rich and crumbly and layered with composted grass and manure of both cows and horses.  Worked GREAT last year ...and this year I've added some terrific bonemeal that I found at an affordable price up in Barrio Agronomía.  After I filled the holes back in with all that lovely stuff, I soaked each one with about 4 - 5½ gallons of water to get things going.

Surrounding those 11 holes, is a trench of sorts, about 30 inches across.  The big clods shoveled-out of the trench go back in, green side down, to hold the black mulch plastic down and to kill the weeds and grass that I shoveled-out.  A soaker hose strip/tape thingy runs down the middle, under the plastic.

When the weather and the plants are ready, the idea is to cut an X in the plastic above each hole and plant the seedlings.

In the meantime, the black plastic is warming the soil and killing the weeds from lack of sunlight.  I'm a little concerned about too much time without water under the plastic ...so I think that I'll start irrigating well in advance of transplanting the seedlings.  I think that the trenches, themselves, will be good irrigation ditches for moistening the soil and still maintaining good drainage.

What's more, the soil under the plastic resembles a "raised bed" in that it is well-drained.  It also resembles "square-foot" gardening methods ...in that you only work the soil in which the plant will actually grow.

It's lumpy and rather ugly but should be low maintanance and resembling the kind of operations you see in small commercial gardens ...something I have my eye on.

At the end of the season ...or beginning of the next, I think that the plastic will be fairly easy to remove.  Then, I can dig holes between the existing ones ...and eventually have a very well-dug garden space.  The plastic looks like it will last at least two seasons.  We'll see.

All that remains is: MORE DIGGING.  My gaucho, Cristian, says what I call gardening looks more like prison labor!  But actually it's not that difficult ...and on a nice day, it's kinda meditative.

My digging, however, was halted by an incredible STROKE of luck ...allowing me to concentrate on my mini-greenhouse ...more on both of those things soon.