2012 Veg Garden Live Art

As noted in an earlier post we decided to leave the volunteer broccoli that popped up en mass amongst the seedlings to act as a living mulch. This beatiful graygreen and purple tapestry is the result. And it was effective! Not only are the weeds practically nonexistant, the soil beneath is cool and moist. As a bonus the younger smaller leaves of the volunteers distracted the munchers from the seedlings.

2012 Veg Garden Volunteers.

One small piece of summer squash can contain 50-100 seeds. We apparently missed some during fall cleanup as this volunteer squash patch proves. So far we have volunteer broccoli, squash and 2 varieties of lettuce from last year. Fortunately we are going for a 'live green' mulch this year to keep weeds down so a little more chaos won't hurt anything.