Preparing for Winter with Pine Needles
Preparing for Winter with Pine Needles
An Experiment
Pine needles are a fabulous natural resource for the Outdoor Classroom. A couple of years ago I began using pine needles instead of pebble stones for my pathways. I ultimately got tired of buying and spreading little bags of stones that never filled the entire area. My garden naturally has an abundance of pine needles. While gardening one day I simply started spreading the needles into all the paths. I love it. A brilliantly natural solution. Now question, can I prep my vegetable garden with pine needles instead of mulch?
I had always heard of gardeners using pine needles as mulch in their gardens; however always feared the needles would change the acidity of the soil. Last year I did the Newspaper Method in my vegetable garden to add nutrients. This year, after a little research, I learned that pine needles do not add a tremedous amount of acidity to the soil.
Here are a few articles I found on the topic:
We won’t know unless we try. Let the experiment begin….
- Step One: Clean out vegetable garden.
- Step Two: Cover the garden bed with pine needles
- Step Three: Add signs and wait until Spring!
Life under my Pine Tree is all cleaned up for now….
Goodnight Vegetable Garden, we will see the results in the Spring. Do you have a favorite method for preparing your garden beds for winter? Have you ever used pine needles as mulch? Share your gardening stories in the post below.
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4 Comments
I certainly have an abundance of pine needles to try this. I used straw this past season for mulch. I am using it to mulch my new garlic barrels for the winter. Straw is good for the soil as it breaks down. The worms like it and we want worms in our garden soil.
Let me know how it goes….I am trying this out in my veggie garden for the first time. I am excited to be using the pine needles in a different way. Tell me about your garlic barrels. 🙂
I haven’t heard of using pine needles before! I’ve heard of the newspaper method before however and wondered how well it worked. Any insight? Did you notice a difference?
My major concern with the pine needles was how rain water would affect them and if it would cause them to spread and scatter away from the garden. I imagined the cleanup of so many pine needles would be tedious and increasingly frustrating after each storm. However, one of the articles you posted mentions that the needles lock together and won’t wash away. It would be interesting to have different garden beds with the same plants in them and use a different method in each one (pine needles, newspaper, mulch, nothing) and see which one works best. The children can come up with hypotheses about each one at the beginning of planting and at the end of the season we could discuss why their hypotheses were correct or incorrect.
You are reading my mind. I am doing exactly that and creating the Ultimate Outdoor Classroom Learning Lab. I have already started trying out the different methods. I am trying pine needles in my Veggie Garden. So far they are all in tact. It will be interesting in the Spring. I will use the newspaper method in another garden and so on. It is one thing to read articles and get advice…and another to actually try it and experiment! Stay tuned!