Hey ya'll, just wanted to tell you my plan for this year's garden and solicit comments. I want to try mulching this year on all of my gardens. I have done small-scale mulching before with small sections of the garden and in raised beds, but never on a large scale. As for scale, I intend to cultivate my usual 1.5 to 2 acres. I have access to all the composted manure and rotten hay I might want. I think it's kinda funny, I just finished reading Will Beattie's last post where the one fellow was talking about busting your rows open with a middle-buster and filling the furrow with compost, as that's exactly what I intend to do. I am then going to fill the middles with mulch after the ground warms up a little. Anyway, just wondered if any of ya'll had experience with mulch and if you do, what your thoughts were.

The composted manure sounds good, but I'd be careful with the rotten hay. You may be planting seeds you don't want. I'd also be careful with mold; I've had some bad reactions in my eyes from moldy hay. Rotten straw would be much better.

Good luck! Mike

I would mix the manure and hay togeather and cover with plastic so it will kill all seeds , before I put on my garden .

I used the plastic stuff one year. Was harder work getting it off in the fall than weeding would have been. And mulch was harder and more work plowing under than cultivating and weeding would have been over the summer.

Mulch decisions depend on your weather, your crops, and your mulch material. Mulch can be terrible in a wetter than usual season, which we have had plenty of in Ohio. Hay may add seeds to the soil, and maybe bad molds. If you can let the hay seeds sprout then hoe the surface to slice roots that's good. Any mulch will harbor slugs, squash bugs, and possibly mice, if you have them in the vicinity. I use domestic ducks for slug control. Composted manure is a good mulch to conserve moisture and keep soil cool. Old straw or strawy bedding is great for melons, pumpkins and squash to keep them off the soil.
My Amish friend always covers his garden with old hay each fall, and after 12 years his soil is like potting soil. I like leaf mulch myself.

I've done that very thing for many years. You have to give plenty of room to your plants for air circulation to keep down disease in case of a wet year. The mulch goes down thick enough so that when the seeds in the hay sprout, they are easily pulled out, or more mulch put over top of that. It's labor intensive in the spring when the temperatures are cooler and when it gets hot, not so much.

Be careful about manure around the spuds. sometimes gives them a weird taste.

And, scab can be a problem in potatoes mulched with manure. You'll have to do some research in your own area to customize the process but it does work well.

I'm on heavy clay and mulch is a necessity. I also like raised beds and I like to much the area between kind of like your middle row idea. It works as long as you have enough biological action to break down the components and not too much water to cause things to sour.