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Commercial organic farms mulch heavily, which nicely controls weeds. Non organic farms spray. Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching, which has myriad othe
by rmrm 9y ago
Commercial organic farms mulch heavily, which nicely controls weeds.
Non organic farms spray.
Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching, which has myriad other benefits besides weed control. I love robots, but mulch is a much better solution.
- sitkack 9y agoMulching robot?
- rmrm 9y agoI am planning on getting 75 yards of wood chips delivered to mulch an orchard we are putting in. For me the mulching robot will be a bobcat I rent to help spread it :) For reference, 75 yards of wood chips (3 tractor trailer loads) + bobcat rental to spread costs $1000 in Bay Area. And provides years or weed prevention, water retention, and soil improvement.
- sitkack 9y agoI have already submitted a YC application about our new SkyMulch Drone powered by Google Cloud ML Engine.
- lostlogin 9y agoPresumably you have seen those vacuum things that pump the mulch out? They do all the motorway berms with them here. Take care you don't go too thick with the mulch as it burns very well and when fresh gets very hot. It's midwinter here and the inside of a pile was too hot to comfortably touch last week.
- topspin 9y ago>> "Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching" Yeah.. wow. Stop by a Home Depot sometime next spring and observe the mountains of bagged mulch they stock. Home gardeners and hobby farmers do indeed mulch. A lot. Where I am they stack mulch between gas pumps at every station. If that's too much trouble a single call will have a truckload on your property inside a week. Simple weed killing robots of the sort depicted here will find their home on lawns. We're not all living in a coastal desert; ample fresh water affords nice lawns and that means squabbling with weeds.
- rmrm 9y agoI was just responding to the video, which seems to clearly be an unmulched home garden. So I am assuming from their marketing that is the application they are targeting.
- corpMaverick 9y agoFirst time taking care of a gardern(Grass) How do I do that ? I have been pulling weeds with a weeder tool all summer.
- rmrm 9y agoYou can use cardboard or a few layers of newsprint to broadly cover things, and then cover that with thick layer of straw or wood chips. It has huge benefits for water retention, weed prevention, as well as providing carbon to be broken down by the soil life which will improve your soil over time.