Red Mulch

When I started this blog six plus years ago, my goal was to talk about both the successes and failures of trying to turn a residential neighborhood home and land into a small, organic farm. I like talking about the successes because they result in beautiful plants and delicious veggies and fruits. But the failures are interesting, too. I learn from these experiences, like when I tried to support tomato plants with a (bad idea). Or when I tried to build a grenhouse out of PVC pipe (worse idea, because I refused to give up even after my experiment blew away three times). So here is the story of another miss at One Love Farm. And, another lesson learned.

A couple weeks ago I posted about using Red Plastic Mulch to increase tomato production. What I didn't talk about was that I was using the Red Plastic Mulch for weed suppression. I've used plastic weed barriers before. You can see a picture here of the plastic weed barrier I use between planting beds.

I soon found out that while the Red Plastic Mulch did a good job of warming the soil to give the plants a head start, it did a terrible job of keeping the weeds down. They sprouted underneath the plastic and literally lifted the plastic off the ground.

Today I pulled off the plastic off of the beans, peppers and eggplant (leaving it on the tomato beds) and found all the beds overgrown with weeds. See the pictures above for a before and after picture. You can barely see the pepper plants in the before picture. I weeded half the beds but will need to do the other half this week before the weeds spread even more!