To help confuse me further, I now read that you can "mulch with just about anything: pine straw, newspaper, plastic, or ... compost." I also see references to mulch breaking down and becoming ... compost. Nooooooooooooooo!
Well, standard yellow onions are supposed to be globes, and since I can't seem to get globes, it's a challenge. It's also a mystery. I also buy what my local stores sell. I bought some shallots online for $5 and found the box contained just 8 sets. Pretty expensive stuff!
Mulch is all about conserving soil moisture. Compost is mainly about nutrients. Which do you need? I don't know about other states, but here in Oregon where logging is a big industry, bark dust is available and commonly used as mulch in flower beds and other places. And because it is raw, fresh wood products it suppresses weeds, but after about 3 years it decomposes and begins growing weeds because the mulch has decomposed into compost. Then it's time for a fresh application of bark dust.
It is a conspiracy!!!!!!! Of course they have rubber mulch made from old car tires that won't break down if you need to live a highly ordered life
Put more mulch on it before it grows weeds. You can also smother the weeds with mulch before they get out of control. I always cover my compost with a weed suppressing mulch. If not, weeds seeds will blow in with the wind. I mulch everything with pine straw. If I had free wood chips or bark I would use that.
I get my pine straw out of the woods. I use a big nursery pot and a pitchfork. I fill the nursery pot with the pitchfork and empty the pot on my truck. I have pine woods just behind the house....and other places. I just got another pickup load the day before last.
How handy! I see you're from "between a rock and a hard place". I'm from Oregon and where I live there is LOTS of forest but it is all privately owned, and no pine patches or other places where I can get such things (fir needles?). I spread plastic over my compost.
I am in Alabama. One spot is owned by neighbors and I have permission to gather the straw. They also have a road...fire lane...cut through.
I need an aspirin! No, I get ot at this point, but I am sure people have used them either interchangably or erroneously or both over the years. I need weed control, and that means mulch. Which may or may not be compost.
Actually, here in Oregon where we can get fir bark dust sold by logging companies, we can put fresh bark dust in flower beds to keep down weeds. It works great but it turns out that it's a very nice place to breed carpenter ants. So near the house it's safer to use compost, only it grows weeds that need constant attention.
Have you tried local sawmills for sawdust? Some local sawmills here give it away for free. You just have to load it. Mitleider gardens grow in sawdust, sand, rock dust, and fertilizer. Once you get sawdust wet it holds water for a long time. But you may not have worry about water where you are. Here we are always looking for rain past May. Saving leaves work too.
But don't till.the sawdust in...unless you want to add a lot of nitrogen. On the surface is great. Or just regular wood chips.
Welllllllllllll, yeah, over the long run. For the first couple of years sawdust will take nitrogen out of the soil, but after it decomposes it's great. Wood chips take too long to decompose due to less surface area, but sawdust is good. Just stay away from conifer sawdust as the pitch can create it's own nutrient problems.
My thoughts exactly. I just don't till anymore. I let the earthworms do the work. But I do haul a lot of mulch.
I would not use compost for weed control. I would use a mulch that blocks the sunlight from the soil. Green plants won't grow without light.
I built 7 raised beds, 3' X 12' by 10 inches deep and bought "garden blend" (Steer compost, sand, peat moss, bark, and chicken manure) from a local vendor ($35/Yd.) and filled the beds. Weeding has been almost non-existent for about 5 years and the plants love it. And it's easy to put netting over them to protect the sprouting seed from birds. It's just not suitable for green beans and corn.
Yeah, I thought about that. What's the point of mulching with compost in which weeds will grow at least as happily as they would in plain dirt? I know you guys didn't say it, but I've seen it elsewhere. It sounds like trying to douse a fire with gasoline.
I've planted in so many different soils, I can't imagine that would be it when none of my neighbors have this problem. Nice try though.
Koda, I just remembered something an AG agent told me concerning my carrots, and I wonder if it is relevant to your flat onion situation: I told this agent that I had laid down some straw (hay) on top of the native soil in my new garden (this supposedly to stop weeds) and that I had then laid good soil (only about 6 inches, though) on top of that. He warned me that when carrots encounter any kind of change in their growing medium, in my case the straw, they rebel, "scrunch," and stop getting longer. They do get fatter, and thy stay healthy, but not longer. He said this would happen regardless of what the different medium was at the point of change. In other words, he was suggesting my carrots would stop lengthening regardless of whether the soil at the change point was better or worse closer to the surface. I know you have planted deep, but is there any chance your onions are encountering a different medium as they grow downward and just say "nah, never mind, I'll just grow fatter" ? You know tons more about gardening than I do, so I'm in no place to question anyone, but if you're out of theories and if no one else has mentioned it as a possibility, I thought it might be as good an explanation as any.
I appreciate the consideration and suggestion but I have always tilled (mechanically and manually) the soil any time I plant, whether in-ground or in raised beds. So I don't see that being the issue. It's strange. Others around me don't think much about it; they just plant onions and get globes. I work at it for 30 years and can't get any globes. I should get a neighbor to come by and plant 6 onions his way while I watch and see what's different. Nah, can't see that happening. Oh well.
Sometimes it's good to have a little bit of mystery in life... I was upset one summer when my spouse "hilled up" all our onions, causing them to rot. It also took me years to realize that the inexpensive onion "sets" we bought in the Spring usually didn't include the really large and good winter keeping kinds of onion, but were really mainly just for green onions in the early Spring and Summer. I grew up in an area with sandy soil, and my spouse grew up in a very dry area. It has taken a good deal of adjustment to get used to Pennsylvania clay soil.
