So, mowing our yard is not so much for keeping the neighbors happy at our tidiness (hah!) as it is a harvest.  Our gardening style is, as much as possible, to mulch the place like mad to keep the grasses and other bystanders somewhat at bay.  We just don’t have time for massive and continuous weeding operations, so we try to keep overgrowth at bay by burying it.  It works reasonably well, but takes massive amounts of mulch to do so.

Mulch raking in progress

We have two main sources of mulch.  The first, as seen in the photos above, is yard clippings.  This is my harvest.  I mow the yard in patterns amenable to raking, since I have no mechanized way of picking up the clippings…  I rake by hand.  So it takes several hours to mow the whole place, and several more hours to rake down the rows of clippings (after they sit for a couple days).  In a good mowing I get about 10 full garden carts of clippings (about the amount I can comfortably pull up the grassy hill).  Then I spread it out wherever it’s needed, or make a big pile for use later.

Pumpkins like mulch

In this photo we used it to extend the new pumpkin patch farther out into the yard.  The pumpkins are looking happy to have the extra space, here in this foggy dusky summer evening shot.

Our other main source of mulch is wet hay.  When, over at the family farm, the weather doesn’t cooperate and a pile of hay comes in that’s too wet to store and isn’t immediately needed for the horses or sheep, then a trailer full appears at Dragonwood.  We used that in the new pumpkin/corn/potato/squash patch as we sowed seedlings to make a good base for all the pathways between the plantings.  That particular patch (about 16×100 feet) was well mulched to start and has fewer weeds by far than those garden patches we didn’t manage to mulch so thoroughly.  As in the pumpkin photo above, our use of mulch around the edges has expanded that patch to about 20 some feet wide and 120 feet long now, an easy way to grow the field by mulching down the grass on each side :-)

And if you’ll excuse me now, I have a lot of raking to do.