Mulching Garlic

I like to mulch with straw. Straw gives the garden a natty look, like the gardener really knows what he's doing. Ha! And really I should have mulched my garlic beds when I planted them last fall. But I haven't been particularly thrilled with straw mulch around garlic. It seems like the weeds always manage to find a place to grow through the straw. So this year looking at the same issue again I thought I'd try to make the straw thicker by chopping it up. This has the added advantage of making the mulch easier to lay around the garlic leaves--if you waited until spring to mulch as I did.

Here's my chopper: the trusty leaf pulverizer. It's really just a weed whacker (line trimmer) in a can, a small motor turning two lengths of plastic line at great speed. Like a food processor, you just drop your vegetable matter--usually leaves in the fall, straw at the moment--from the top. The Whirring plastic line chops it to pieces and it all falls conveniently into the trash can underneath. I always seem to have at least one pile of rotting straw somewhere in the garden, usually last year's mulch.

The trash can practically carries itself to the garlic bed, where I spend an hour or so arranging the chopped straw around the plants, about two inches thick. I like the idea of foraging for mulch on site, rather than buying something in a plastic bag from the garden center. In the past I tried mixing chopped leaves and shredded newspaper together for mulch. But the newspaper liked to blow around too much in the wind. Now I'm thinking the straw could easily be stretched by mixing in some of the shredded leaves I've been saving from last fall. The first job of mulch is to hold moisture in the soil. But it also does a good job of suppressing weeds, and garlic doesn't care much for weeds.

How do you like to mulch your garlic?