Every three or four years we replenish the mulch beneath the plants in our blueberry patch. It’s important for several reasons. It suppresses weeds, helps retain moisture and as it breaks down over time it feeds the worms and microbes that help create the rich, loose soil which blueberries really like. Lately we have been using “sawdust” from a mill North of Santa Cruz which we are very happy with. It is much coarser than the sawdust from your home table saw, which means it stays around longer. It is also very uniform in consistency and almost entirely free of the trash and other impurities that we have seen in over mulches that we have tried over the years. And perhaps most importantly it is made up entirely of either Redwood, or Douglas Fir, both of which are more acidic than a lot of other types of wood and help to maintain the low soil pH that blueberries need.
Spreading mulch gives me the opportunity to use one of our favorite implements–the Millcreek row mulcher. Built by an Amish company in Lancaster County Pennsylvania, this ingenious device spreads the mulch in a neat row right beneath the plant. It only takes a quick follow up pass with a bedding rake to even it out. After it is loaded from above, it uses a series of chains, gears and belts to advance the mulch from the main compartment to a smaller, high-speed belt that shoots it out the side. It is pulled through the field by a tractor, from which it is powered via the PTO shaft, and it allows us to accomplish an amazing amount of work in a very short time. In roughly 6 hours I was able to move a mountain of mulch (100 square yards) from in front of our packing shed to the field where it needed to be. Shoveling it out of the back of a pickup would probably take 6 days!
The row mulcher is one of the implements that I baby the most. I always have a place for it in the shed out of the rain. And every time I take it out I spend an hour or so lubing the bearings and oiling the chains. It has rewarded us, however, with almost complete reliability and flawless performance. Now if all of the other implements were that way I would be one happy farmer.
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