Monday 2 January 2012

Sowing directly into mulched beds

Here's a happy little seedling:


It looks great, and I'm sure it will grow well. But it's the only one of about 25 seeds planted in this bed that have survived.


A month or so I pulled up the daisy and begonia that overran this bed. I added manure and some stinky dynamic lifter, then sheet mulched with newspaper and topped it off with sugar cane mulch. My plan was to plant a crop of sunflowers for a spectacular annual show before planting it up with natives.

The problem was sowing the sunflower seeds. To get down to the soil, I had to dig through the mulch and punch a hole in the newspaper. This meant that by the time I'd got down to the soil, there was a quite a deep hole I had to drop the seed into.


Not many of these seeds came up. I suspect this is because they had too far to grow to get back up to the surface.

So this morning I decided to have another go at this bed. This time I dug the little holes down to the soil, then filled them up to the surface with mushroom compost (from Bunnings). This meant I could plant the seeds to the recommended depth of about 10mm and water in then cover them over lightly with sugar cane mulch. 






I'll keep my eye on these over the next week or so - hopefully we'll get a few flowers in this bed!

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