The Magic Of Grass Under Tomato Plants (Big Harvests)

How does your lawn help you grow better tomatoes? So I've been growing tomatoes for probably about 20 years and for the last four years I have been mulching them with grass clippings from the lawn and it's coming into tomato season now and I wanted to share why you should consider using your lawn to help you grow better quality tomatoes. I've learned that with gardening sometimes it's the simplest of solutions that are the most effective. Grass is not a waste resource and it isn't just something that we should put on our compost bins and there are so many little things that we can do in our garden that make a big difference. I'll give you a little example here. I've got like a hotbed here it's a type of compost bin and at the base I've planted comfrey here just to use any of the excess nutrients and it means that I'm pairing two things together to make the whole system on a whole far more productive. And pairing grass with tomatoes is another perfect example. Now the one thing that tomatoes want to be healthy is a consistent soil moisture but how do you do that in a polytunnel when it doesn't rain and particularly during the hot dry weather it's very easy to dry out? Well the first kind of thing to do is to install something like a soaker hose system so you can provide that gradual irrigation to your tomatoes and then the next thing you want to do is mulch them. Now the reason why consistent soil moisture is so important is because if it's not consistent it can lead to a problem called blossom end rot. Very often people attribute that to a lack of calcium but in most scenarios it's because of inconsistent soil moisture and so that's the first thing that is that it helps to create that nice consistent soil moisture and eliminates problems like blossom end rot. Now there are some potential drawbacks of using grass as a mulch which I will cover at the end of the video. What's so important to understand is that nature doesn't like bare soil. Bare soil it dries out very quickly, the temperatures of the soil can change quite rapidly between the peak of the day and then the evening and also it's just where weeds want to come and grow because again it's not natural and weeds and nature's kind of plaster and so using a mulch like grass because grass is pretty much a regenerative resource you cut it and it grows back yes a bit more slowly over winter but using that as a mulch helps buffer those temperature extremes which then reduces the stress of the soil microbes or to the soil microbes and then also reduces the stress that the plant experiences and so grass in a nutshell regulates soil temperature and it also helps to reduce evaporation of water from the soil and those two reasons alone even though they're going to be more that I'm going to be sharing are enough to for me to justify growing tomatoes. In fact it was the sole reason of reducing water evaporation which is why I started mulching tomatoes with grass in the first place. It goes without saying that soil life for healthy crops is really important and what you do with mulching with grass instead of say like just mulch with compost is that because it's this organic matter or this organic material it can activate the kind of the full soil food web because if you're just using compost then really that is going to more heavily weigh towards helping microbes like bacteria fungi things that we can't really see but for these bigger bits I might need things like certain beetles earthworms things like that to help break that down to then provide it in almost a more manageable sense for some of the microbes. It requires a team effort like in a compost bin there's every kind of critter that you can find in a compost bin because it requires that team effort and if I can have that team effort of nature coming and breaking this down what I'm doing is I'm adding organic matter and nutrients into the soil to help reduce my compost dependency for next year and because of being in a polytunnel the most important thing is to have a soil that holds onto moisture and one molecule of organic matter can hold on to four molecules of water. I just want to show you how easy it is to weed when you've just got grasses and mulches that you literally just pull it out and you can just leave it on the surface and because there's no soil contact that's just going to dry up and break down. I think it's important to note that you don't just have to use grass like whilst it is a free resource and gardeners love free things there are other things you can use to mulch your tomatoes to keep them healthy. I've got a perfect example in front of me here this is comfrey and I can cut the comfrey mulch it under the tomatoes and this is also going to break down in fact that's going to break down really quickly and help provide a slow release feed for your tomato crops to help them with ripening and developing the fruits. Now if you've maybe set up a new polytunnel and you're really trying to build soil health as best as possible you can use stuff like eco slow feeding ramiel mulch. I was gifted this from eco crops and it is using willow ramiel mulch which is very high in nutrients compared to other types of wood chip and it's partly broken down and it just creates a really nice covering that you can use around your tomatoes. I've got this around my different pepper plants here and I'm just going to then remove the peppers at the end of the year keep this in place and it's going to continue to break down and it is a great way of building up healthy soil. So this grass here was freshly cut yesterday and it's already heating up and that's like kind of the key thing when you're applying grass as a mulch don't do it in really thick layers for two reasons firstly it might create a bit of heat but also if you do it too thickly it can create an anaerobic condition a bit of a underneath so just aim for about five centimeters or two inches as a mulch that's going to be perfect and just make sure that you're not using lawn clippings perhaps you want to use your neighbor's lawn clippings like what other resources are outside your garden that some people see as waste that you can use to grow better tomatoes than your neighbors is make sure that their lawns aren't sprayed because you don't want any kind of particular broadleaf herbicide then going to where you're growing tomatoes so just make sure that it comes from nice unsprayed lawns. By far the biggest concern though when it comes to using grass clippings be it in a polytunnel or outside in the garden as a mulch is spreading weed seeds everywhere. Now there's a couple of things that I want to say if your idea is you're going to keep your beds permanently mulched which I think in a polytunnel is a good idea particularly over winter it wants that mulch you don't want the bare soil over winter then actually you don't have a problem the problem is is if you're using grass from lawns that have got quite a lot of grass seed in and then you remove it and then you don't put a different mulch down that is when you're going to get weeds kind of growing through but if you maintain on top of it if you have a small garden all you need is a hoe and every couple of weeks you can just hoe off any of the weed seeds coming through and it's quite easy to manage but really your soil is begging for that layer of protection like in nature. In nature grass is very often that layer of protection so in a way you're you're being as close to nature as possible by using by harvesting these grass clippings and providing them as a mulch to help your plants grow. The other thing you don't want to do when you are mulching anything with anything is you don't want to smother around the stem you don't want to pile it up against the stem that can just lead to various different issues it's not worth doing instead what you do is you do your usual kind of like layer around and you can pack it around but then go through using your fingers just to like release it a bit and it creates this little bowl shape which actually if you're watering using a hose or a watering can it just helps to collect that water and concentrate it down into the stem and it keeps it open nice for airflow and keeps your plant healthy. There's nothing that cool about grass it's not an amazing invention that you can buy or brew or something it's just something you cut for so many people it's a waste resource but what grass does offer is an incredible amount of benefits for what is seen as something that people just walk over every day. How dare people just walk over grass every day without appreciating the amazing benefits it can bring to growing tomatoes. So if you want to find out more about this kind of gardening of the simple systems and methods like learning about how to pair comfrey with a compost bin or finding out more about grass then I think you'll enjoy these two videos.