I've mulched my garden with 2-3 inches of oak leaves. Do I need to bother raking the leaves away and hilling soil on my potatoes, or will the leaves perform the same function?
And yes, I've read that oak leaves can acidify my soil. Interestingly, just as many people say that they won't. My soil tester says that the soil is 7.0, so I'm not worried. On the plus side, the leaves are doing an amazingly good job of keeping the weeds down and the soil moisture in!
I mulch everything I can with a thick layer of wet leaves stolen from the neighbors the previous fall. With the potatoes I usually hill them first to give the tubers a little more room to grow and then put the leaves on to keep the weeds down. Then I cover with grass clippings for two reasons. 1) The dark leaves can really heat up in the sun. and 2) worms and bugs eat away almost all of the leaves by the end of the season so the grass clippings end up being the mulch over any emergent tubers.
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CharlieBear
- Green Thumb
- Posts: 588
- Joined: Thu Jul 14, 2011 5:19 pm
- Location: Pacific NW
a couple of inches of leaves will not generally be enough to keep the potatoes from turning green from the sun. I use leaves or straw for hilling but I mound them up at least a high as I would the dirt around them (about 1/2 way up). Note leaves alone don't work as well as straw. It compacts and decomposes fairly quickly and you can still have sunburn. I have one row each way this year as an experiment and I have had to put more leaves on twice and only once on 1/2 a row with the straw. Note the leaves tend to compact pretty bad and that can reduce you crop some as I have found in the past. I know "cut" the leaves up first- way to much work. Note, it takes a long time for oak leaves to acidify the soil, many, many years.