For a vegetable garden to reach its full potential, you have to fill it with the best garden mulch you can find. This will take a little extra work in the beginning of the planting season, but since I'm a lazy man by nature, I do what I can to keep any physical labor to a minimum.

I picked my first tomatoes today. Several were small and several were jumbo sandwich size. Except for watering the plants every few days, I haven't expended much energy on my garden since I spread mulch around the tomatoes.

Usually I would put leaves that I saved from last fall around the plants and then relax for a few weeks until a few errant weeds started sprouting up from the thin spots in the mulch cover. Then I would cut them down with my hoe. This year I took care of that problem immediately after setting the plants in the garden.

For years there has been an ongoing debate about which kind of vegetable garden mulch is best to use around tomatoes; black plastic, red plastic, leaves, pine needles or straw. I decided to use two different types this year; one for its functionality and the other for the esthetics.

Having used black plastic in past gardens, I knew that it would greatly reduce the amount of weeds that normally would spring up among my tomatoes. The only problem with this kind of mulch is that it is not very pretty.

Healthy tomato plants loaded with fruit hanging from their branches like Christmas ornaments appear a little less beautiful when surrounded by black plastic. The trees in my backyard provided the answer to this little puzzle; leaves that I had bagged last year.

Obviously leaves alone would help weed control, but I wanted my little garden to be beautiful as well. After dumping the leaves I had bagged last fall on the rows, I spread them out to cover every inch of the plastic. I left about an eight by eight inch opening around the tomato plant. It can breathe and I can water and fertilize.

In the fall I'll pull the plastic out from under the leaves and then plow the leaves into the soil, enriching it. The black sheathing, along with my tomato cages, will be put in the shed to use again next spring.

Making mulch out of leaves isn't very hard; just rake them up in the fall and put them in plastic bags to be used in the spring. While leaves have a more natural look than black plastic mulch, they are not as pretty as wheat straw.
 
The problem with wheat straw mulch is unless it is a couple of years old; the seeds will be fertile and sprouts of wheat will soon appear everywhere in your garden. That certainly entails a lot of work, something I try to avoid.

Pine straw works well also. I used to believe that pine straw was too acidic to be strewn near vegetables. It seems now that there is little validity to that assumption. It hasn't hurt my garden in the last few years, so I guess vegetables like the aroma of pine straw.

Mulch helps retain moisture in the soil and retards weed growth, leaving us energy challenged folks with little to do with the crop until it is ready to be picked. When you think about it, that's pretty neat.