Sheet Mulching

A few years back when we were just starting to learn about Permaculture, we discovered the concept of sheet mulching and very close planting. The idea is, don't dig. Digging damages soil and soil life.

Planting your plants close together mimicks nature and helps to reduce moisture loss and creates little microclimates where plants get protection from each other.

Have you seen the movie "The March of the Penguins"? When the penguins huddled together in the extreme cold they usually survived, but the moment they stray out on their own they die. Like the penguins, plants do better when grouped with other plants, rather than planted in their own mini deserts where they dry out or get burned by too much sun.

Here are some pictures of what we did, before and after things started to grow.

First, we lay out some old newspaper.

Then we covered it with pea straw to reduce moisture loss and suppress unwanted plants (weeds). In this we planted various a range of herbs and other plants making sure that we plant through the newspaper and into the soil below.


Heres what it looked like about 3 months later...


Much nicer than grass don't you think?

We later put Ponga log (tree fern) edging around it as you can see, and added gravel to the path. The gravel actually absorbs warmth from the sun during the day and releases it at night helping to regulate the temperature in this area and meant we have now had some limited success growing herbs like basil. Previously, they died rather quickly.

This is a reasonable approach to starting a garden, although we've tried other methods with better success which we'll share later.