No-Dig Gardening with Scythe Cut Mulch

​  I first became interested in using hay for deep mulching my vegetable garden, back in the 1990's, after seeing a wonderful film about Ruth Stout, and her deep hay mulch gardening technique, at a Community Gardening event in Minneapolis. I had been using straw to mulch my garden beds since the 1980's, after seeing The One-Straw Revolution. I had always heard it was a bad idea to mulch with hay, because there are too many weed seeds. But what if you cut your own hay with a scythe, and didn't harvest when there were seed heads? 

​In 1999 we bought 20 acres and had a house built in a corner of a hayfield. I bought a scythe, a broad fork, and a garden cart. In 2001, I started a Ruth Stout garden in the hayfield near our house. Ruth Stout pioneered no-dig gardening by simply piling on a deep layer of hay mulch, to suppress weeds and to build the soil from the top down, and continuously adding more mulch as needed. To plant seeds, she simply pulled some mulch aside and planted into the soil, and then closed the mulch back around the plant as it grew, and added more mulch as needed. If weeds came up, she simply plopped a flake of baled hay on them. She owned a 10 acre hayfield next to her garden, which she had a neighbor bale, in exchange for some of the hay. She had the bales stacked up by her garden for a plentiful supply of mulch. 

I think Ruth Stout just covered her entire garden area with deep hay mulch, but I wanted create a garden with very defined footpaths, so that I would not compact the clay soil in the garden beds by walking on them. I scythed and raked the area for my garden clear, and plotted out ten 4'x8' garden beds, with 2' wide grass pathways in between. I had planned on mowing the garden paths with my old push reel mower, and to mulch out the sod under the new garden beds with a heavy layer of hay mulch. And then to continuously add more mulch as needed.

I then selectively scythed areas of grass from my hayfield, that did not have seed heads, and let it dry. Then I hauled it to my garden area by the house in a garden cart. I quickly learned that the garden cart did not hold a lot of hay, and that when I tried to pile it on, the wheels rolling over the bumpy soil of my field would bounce some hay off, and I would leave a trail of hay that I would have to pick up a second time. So I started raking the hay onto a tarp, and just dragged it over to the garden by the house. I piled up about an 8-inch deep layer of hay mulch on the garden beds to smother out the sod, and waited.

Once the grass on the paths grew back, I discovered that the little wheels of the push reel mower also bounced around too much on the bumpy clay soil surface, to work well, and it could not cut the clumps of orchard grass that came up. So I thought,"I have a scythe! Why not just move the garden beds a scythe stroke apart and mow them with my scythe? I had the space, and I could use what I cut from the lawn directly on the beds for mulch."

So I redid all the deep mulched garden beds, so that the paths in between were a nice and easy scythe stroke wide, about 6 ft. Unfortunately, the 4x8 beds spread out like that and mounded with mulch, reminded me of a cemetery. So I redid it once again, and lengthened the beds to 12ft. This looked much better.

I had also discovered in my first attempt that some of the hayfield grasses, like orchard grass, that I was trying to smother out, were vigorous enough to quickly grow up through the mulch. So I saved up some cardboard and tried covering the sod on the new beds with the cardboard first, then added the hay mulch on top of it. This was not very successful either. The cardboard was too stiff to conform well to the bumpy, clay soil surface, and would dry out. My new farm was in a very windy area, and the hot weather and high winds kept drying out the mulch on top of the cardboard faster than I could keep up with watering it. Once dried out, the wind would slide the dry hay off the slippery cardboard, and then the cardboard would dry out and blow away too. The hay mulch placed directly on the sod stayed put, because more moisture would wick up from the soil and anchored it down.

By 2003 I had started raising ducks, and I was making hay to use as duck feed and bedding as well. In time I learned that the duck hay bedding, plastered with manure, was much better at smothering out the sod for a new garden bed, than the sheets of cardboard, and it was much easier to compost in place like that anyway, rather than trying to turn it into a compost heap. I later learned that tree leaves also plaster down and work well as the first layer. Especially maple leaves. A 4-6 inch layer of fall leaves, covered with the weight of another 6-8 inch layer of scythe-cut green grass or dry hay mulch, plasters down the leaves nicely, once rain and snow soak it down, and smothers the sod much better than hay alone. Plus, I think the decaying leaves increases the mycorrhiza in the garden soil. Earthworms also love it, and help break down the leaves and mulch, and mix the compost deeper in the soil. I noticed that earthworms especially seemed to like the plastered goose manure bedding. When I cleaned out my goose house at the end of nesting season, and used the matted down bedding to mulch out new garden beds, by spring I had humous topsoil, so deep and loose, that I could stir it with my big toe. So if you have a yard with leaves to rake up, and a field with hay to mow, you have good ingredients to start a deep-mulch garden bed somewhere. 

Seasonal timing:

Whenever I used my duck and goose bedding to start a new garden bed, I would layer the sheets plastered hay onto the sod, and cover it thickly with hay or fresh cut grass, and not plant into it until the following spring. This gave it time to kill the sod and give the duck and goose bedding time to completely compost it place. 

Fall is the obvious time of year to rake leaves and to use them as your base layer of mulch, for creating a new mulched-out garden bed, ready to plant into in the spring. I learned that raking leaves in the fall was not ideal for the insects that need the dead leaf ground cover to survive winter. So I would put off raking the leaves until early spring. When the grass was high enough to mow again for the first time of the season, I would scythe the lawn grass and the decaying leaves at the same time. The scythe stroke raked most of the leaves into a windrow, along with the cut grass, which made it easy to rake onto a tarp and drag it to the new garden bed area. I would scythe the new garden bed area clear, and then spread a dense 4-6-inch deep layer of the dead leaves and scythe-cut lawn grass mix to form the new garden bed. I would then pile the fresh cut grass I had cut to clear the space on top of the leaf-and-grass mulch, and pile on the grass from subsequent mowings as well. The brown leaves and green grass make an ideal composting mix, and matte down and decompose nicely. Here in Garden Zone 4, if I cut and rake the lawn in April, and use it right away to mulch out a garden bed, the underlying sod is pretty well smothered and can be planted into by the end of May, with starter plants or potatoes.

Windrow Gardening

I got the idea for windrow gardening, after I taught my first Advanced Scythe Workshop. Eight advanced scythers using long 2010 haymaking blades, and mowing prime hay, around the solstice, laid down so much grass that I could not keep up with processing it all by myself. By the time I was done tedding and turning all that hay, I was late for starting all over again. Plus, it kept getting rained on, and I would have to start all over again. By the second time the hay got rained on, it was out of control. I didn't have the time to keep at it and some of windrows and haycocks (small stacks of partially dried hay, piled high for overnight, to minimize the surface area that would get wet from dew or rain) of wet, ruined hay, were not gotten to, and remained in the field for several weeks. They completely killed the grass underneath. Even after I finally had all the ruined hay picked up and hauled to my composting pile, the sod was extremely slow to recover. By fall I could still see where the windrows had been. I could still see where a large haycock had been, the following summer. I was surprised at how easy it was to kill the sod, when I wasn't doing it on purpose! 

So, I thought what if I harnessed this sod killing power of the windrow to advantage? What if instead of cutting hay in the field, and hauling away to my garden by the house for mulch, what if I used it to create lines of mulched-out garden beds in the hayfield! I started experimenting with scything a double windrow, by going across the field in one direction, creating one windrow, and then turning around and scything back in the other direction, depositing a second windrow on and/or against the first, in effect doubling up the volume of the first windrow. Subsequent mowings could either be added green directly to the windrow, or dried into hay, and if successful, dragged away and stored by the goose house. If the hay was ruined by repeated rainfall, I could simply use it as mulch right there on the mulch-lines in the field, instead of having to haul it away to the compost pile as before. And, if I taught an Advanced Scythe Workshop again, instead of leaving me on my own to process an overwhelming amount of hay, I could just make what hay I could and use the rest right there in the field as mulch. The workshop would then immediately benefit my farm, instead of leaving me with a big mess to clean up.

The area of the field that had originally given me the idea, had very rich Loess topsoil, and dense grass and red clover and a diverse amount of other plants. It had been grazed and fertilized by ducks and geese, and had been scythed for hay, after the geese were preoccupied sitting on their nests for an entire month. My neighboring dairy farmer told me that Wisconsin was the "Dairy State" because Wisconsin had some of the densest grass (the number of plants per square foot) in the country. "It takes twice as much land to feed a cow on sandy soil.", he said. When mowed at peak haymaking time, a double windrow was heavy enough to smother the sod.

By contrast, in 2015, I moved to a farm some 60 miles away, in an area of sandy soil, and I learned the meaning of dirt-poor. Water and nitrogen just leached away. There was a thick layer of thatch under all the sparse grass that just would not break down. There just wasn't enough nitrogen in the soil to break it down. I would have to mow above the thick thatch with my scythe blade. 
Ideally, I like the windrow beds to be spaced 2 scythe strokes apart, so that mowing and moving the vegetation would be as efficient as possible. Here on this sandy loam soil, I needed to either space the rows 4 scythe strokes apart and move the scythe cut grass in between, over to the main windrow beds, in order to build up a dense enough layer of mulch to smother out the sod, or I would have to haul in extra mulch from elsewhere. 
I opted to haul in extra mulch for the windrow garden beds, since the farm house had a huge front yard with two gigantic silver maple trees. Mowing with a lawnmower cuts and chops up the tops of the grass into small pieces that can be left in place for the grass to grow though. Mowing a lawn with a scythe, cuts the grass closer to the ground and therefore makes a longer blade of cut grass which gets deposited with every stroke into a concentrated windrow, which you need to rake up and haul away, if you want a neat looking and easy to mow lawn. I chose to mow it with a scythe, and to haul the fresh cut grass out to the windrow garden beds in my garden cart. When the silver maple leaves fell in the fall, I would wait until spring to "rake the leaves". By that time they were brown and shriveled, and the grass grew up through them. It was easy to scythe the grass and the leaves and rake everything onto a tarp to drag out to my windrow garden in the open field on the other side of the driveway. This combination of green grass and dead maple leaves made a fantastic smothering layer of mulch. I especially liked to use it to establish a new windrow garden bed with it. I would do this a little bit different than my classic idea for windrow gardening. Instead of mowing to create a double windrow, I would mow the strip clean where I wanted the new mulchline to be, and then I would put down a 6-8 inch layer of the lawn grass and leaf mulch. Then I would cover it back up with the grass I had scythed to clear the way. The green grass with the dead leaves really plastered down nicely, and very effectively smothered out the sod. If I created the mulchline, or garden bed in April, when the lawn needed mowing for the first time of the season, by the end of May/early June, the sod under the mulch would be smothered well enough to plant potatoes, or started plants.