It’s been about 10 days since Vince pulled back all the mulch from the fruit trees . . about 50 of them . . he was a tired boy!
He raked all the old mulch back, fertilized the trees, mostly with granular type fertilizer, then put down all new mulch. They all look so nice!
Trees
The problem is that the chickens love to scratch around in the mulch, find bugs and who knows what else. Even though we’ve been watering the trees, I didn’t want to let the chickens out til after we’ve had a good rain so all those fertilizer granules are far enough down or dissolved that they don’t attract the attention of the chickens. From what I’ve read, the chickens might eat one or two granules, decide they don’t like it and not eat more so it probably isn’t a problem but I don’t want to take any chances.
It’s raining! That means the ground will be soft and there will probably be more bugs under the oak trees where they love to scratch (no fertilizer applied there), and hopefully the fertilizer will no longer be where they notice it and are tempted to eat it.
I’ll keep them in the fenced pen til the rain stops . . maybe into the weekend so by then, it will have been almost three weeks since the fertilizer was applied. They will be so happy to get out again!
katie z. says
It’s raining here too! Happy dance!!
Sherrill says
WOW!!! Did you have the STRONG winds we did? Oh my gosh! The rain was driving SO HARD and I looked out and the winds had blown my shed doors open (which have a pretty heavy-duty padlock thing. I had to wait a bit to run out there because with the wind AND rain as strong as it was I was afraid I’d get swept away. How come Vince replaces the mulch? Doesn’t it kinda compost around the tree and then you add new on top? That would be a lot of work (but everything you guys do are a lot of work!!).
Judy Laquidara says
I’m not sure about the winds. It was the thunder that had Rita in a panic. I didn’t notice the winds so much.
We don’t want the mulch to get packed down because we want every drop of water we can get to go down to the roots. Vince rakes all the mulch back every spring, kinda “stirs up” the top layer of dirt, fertilizes, puts the old mulch back but adds more mulch.
The chickens get in it and scratch and sometimes the lawn mower gets too close but by spring, we always need extra mulch.