Garden Update

 Here is how the garden looked as of a couple days ago.

A few nice looking lettuce patches in serious need of thinning.

 The results of the thinning....1.5 lbs of good looking young lettuce plants.

 Unfortunately the next day after I did the thinning of the lettuce, some critter came in and ate a bunch of the remaining lettuce plants.  That seems to happen somewhat often for some reason.  No animal activity, but then I thin some plants and something comes along and eats some of the remaining plants.  Very frustrating.  Also frustrating is that the same animal mauled the two remaining broccoli plants that weren't previously attacked.  Clearly this is not a small animal, as it broke off 1/4" stems and ate 6-8" long leaves.  If we were out in the suburbs, I'd guess a woodchuck, but I have no idea what around here could/would do this.

 Up until the last couple days it has been hot and dry here.  I had to water the garden basically every day.  This was a bit of a problem last year as well.  I have noticed that the few areas of the garden that have a layer of last year's leaves as mulch stay moist much longer, have far more worm/insect activity going on under the soil, and have less weeds.  With that in mind, I figured that it would be a good idea to mulch the rest of the garden.  Newspapers and straw are two cheap mulches that I thought of.  I tried using newspapers last year, but they kept blowing away, even with small rocks as weights, so I'll try straw this year.

I calculated the volume of a standard sized bale of straw and assuming I wanted 1" thick, I calculated 4-5 bales of straw.  The lady at the garden/farm center said $5.50 for a bale of straw, but its a big bale of straw.  She showed me rough sizes with her arms, and it looked like standard size to me, so I got 4.  Turns out they really are pretty big, and quite compacted.  I would guess 40-50lbs per bale.

I started spreading it out about 2" deep.  Muffin was supervising.

Jaime also joined in on the supervision.

It turns out that there is a lot of straw in those bales!  One bale probably would have been perfectly fine.  I ended up using two bales and spreading it on the paths as well as putting thick layers on some weedy areas around the edges of the garden.