Mulch ado about something big!

We are 'soil farmers'. We believe that soil is the key leverage point in the chain of abundance. Look after the soil and you get abundant, healthy plants which can feed the animals and they turn the energy into wool.
We think of the soil like a gardener would. Home gardeners use mulching to suppress weeds and hold moisture in the soil (stop it being baked by the sun). We do the same thing. We started mulching with bales of rotting hay when we noticed that the spots where we had fed out hay during the drought always had richer and deeper soil profile a few months later. Mulching can encourage the microbe and bug growth that leads to soil growth.
Now we use a mulching attachment for our tractor.


Uamby Manager Daniel Kiely with next door neighbour Angus Gorrie, home from boarding school for the Christmas vacation. Angus is doing some mulching for us to earn some money. He is a good worker.
This is the pasture - Saffron Thistle is inedible for sheep.
Mulching is extremely efficient.
This season has been very wet and there is a lot of long, rank grass that the sheep will never eat. (There is also a bumber crop of Saffron Thistle, Scotch Thistle and Skeleton Weed swaying in the breeze. And a big crop of Bathurst Burr and Khaki Weed emerging.) So we have been mulching, and with great success. My brother-in-law Breck Hayward comes up regularly now, after his breakthrough (see a later blog) and loves to sit on the tractor and go round and round. We love to see him do it. I have included several shots of before and after to show you what mulching does and how it encourages sweet new growth to shoot.
New native perennial shoots appear less than a week after mulching.

Mulching is one of our Bare Earth strategies, keeping the earth covered as protection against erosion by wind and rain and encouraging soil growth.