Mulching on a slope

When we first got our honeyberry bushes five years back, we covered up the entire hillside where we planted them with groundcloth and mulch to protect them from weeds. This turned out not to be one of our more brilliant ideas. Apparently, groundcloth is very slippery stuff, and if you put it on a steep slope like the one in our yard, anything you put on top will slide right off it. So, instead of a nice bed of mulch, we ended up with an expanse of bare groundcloth with pools of mulch (and some ambitious barren strawberry plants) around the bottom. 

The mulch might have stayed in place without the groundcloth underneath, but Brian was reluctant to remove it. There was no guarantee the mulch would stay put without it, and even if it did, it probably wouldn't do as good a job of deterring weeds by itself. Instead, he thought we should lay down some deer netting between the groundcloth and the mulch, giving the mulch a rougher surface to cling to. And since we had to net the honeyberries themselves anyway to protect the ripening berries from birds, we decided to take advantage of Memorial Day weekend to tackle both jobs at once. 

On Saturday, we got out our collection of deer nets and started cutting pieces to fit around the bushes. Rather than cut holes in the netting and try to squeeze the bushes through them, we just cut one long rectangle to place on either side of each berry bush, angling them to achieve maximum coverage and tucking in any excess around the trunks of the bushes. (We did have to cut holes in a couple of places to fit them over the concrete boulders that dot the slope.)

The trickiest part was removing and then replacing the hollow concrete blocks along the fence line. We didn't want to take them all off at once, because they were helping to hold down the groundcloth. So Brian had to repeatedly perch halfway up the slope between two bushes, removing the concrete blocks and handing them to me so he could place the netting, then putting the blocks back in place to hold it down. He also added long spikes to the center of some of the concrete blocks to help hold them in place. (We couldn't treat all of them this way because some of them had rocks in the way, and anyhow, we didn't have enough spikes.)

We also decided, sort of on the spur of the moment, to make a border for the mulched area with some old slate pavers we had sitting around unused. The idea was to create a flat, smooth path for rainwater to flow down so that it would be less inclined to cut a channel through the mulch. We laid the pavers out along the edge of the mulch zone and pounded some more of those big spikes in to hold them in place. Then we spread the last of the mulch from our most recent trip to the Belle Mead Co-Op over the slope and went inside for some well-deserved showers. 

At this point, the hillside was pretty evenly covered with mulch. However, I wasn't confident yet that it would stay that way. That slope had looked pretty good the first time we tried mulching it, but it didn't take long for the rain to start wearing paths through the mulch and leaving bare patches. So I knew the first rainfall would be the real acid test.

As it turned out, we didn't have long to wait. We had a brief thundershower that very night and a couple of additional squalls over the course of the following week, and so far, the mulch has mostly stayed put. There are a couple of tiny bare patches around one bush on the far end, but that might just be because the mulch wasn't laid very thickly to begin with. We've since returned to the Co-Op and hauled home another half-yard, so we can add another layer and cover up those bare patches in the process. Then we'll keep a sharp eye out to see if any more appear. If they do, we may need to come up with a different solution. But for now, fingers crossed, this seems to be working.

Of course, after finishing this job on Saturday, we still needed to put up some additional netting to protect the berry bushes themselves. But that's a topic for another post.