Mulching — the Key to Successful Gardening!

If you want a great vegetable garden with less weeding, less watering, no fertilizing and no tilling, it's time to start mulching.

I have been gardening in different capacities since I was a boy, but it was only in recent years that I learned about employing mulches in a vegetable garden. If you want a great vegetable garden with less weeding, less watering, and no tilling, it's time to learn about mulches, and how fundamental they are to the success of a permaculture garden.

This bed of kale was mulched with ramial woodchips. The only thing I did to this bed in the spring was to put the kale in — there was almost no weeding or tilling and the kale is doing great. (

I had eyes, but I did not see

I used to have fairly extensive rose gardens at my previous residence, and every year when I was moving my tomato transplants into my vegetable garden, I would always jam the leftover ones into the heavily mulched rose gardens. Later on in the growing season, I would usually note that the rose garden tomatoes were always bigger, better, and juicier than the ones in my vegetable garden. I would always marvel at this phenomenon, but never made the connection that it was the mulch.

In 2011 I started learning about permaculture. From everything I read (and at the risk of over-simplification), it seemed that the secret to high-yield, low-maintenance gardens was mulch - and this helped me make sense of the awesome tomatoes in my rose garden! When I thought about it, I realized that much of the natural world works this way. Any forest, for instance, is essentially a super-low-maintenance garden, and if we consider all the living things that are provided for by that forest, it is high yield. The forest literally pulls carbon out of the air and turns it into food and shelter, with no human intervention.