I've never heard it called Dust mulch before, What I think you are talking about is the loose dirt from running a cultivator through the middles of the rows of a crop. If you had been raised on a row crop farm you would know what I'm talking about. They used to set the cultivator sweeps and disk openers so they would throw dirt up around the row of plants to cover up the small weeds around the stems or the base of the row of plants. All it really amounts to is close cultivation. The loose dirt will dry out on top but it will act as mulch does to help keep the moisture in the soil. Farmers don't use cultivators to stir the dirt in the middles of the rows anymore. Just like printed Feed sacks, egg crates and cream cans. If you could find an old 'farmer' to talk to they might could explain it to you. I could show you better than explain it here. That is the jest of it.

Auther,

That is exactly what I was talking about. I wonder if I developed a simple machine to spread dust. I wonder if that concept could be used on a large garden as part of the weed control program.

I already use a 3pt row crop cultivator extensively. I also use a row hipper to cultivate potatoes and corn.

Here is one link to "dust mulch" see below...

Here is a link that might be useful: Old article about dust mulch

I think that ad sounds as if they're embellishing. And that they're really only talking about the effect of cultivation? Where cultivating the soil lightly pushes "dust" particles into the ground or surface cracks acting like a mulch while disturbing weeds, exactly what Auther writes but he know more than me - or you for that matter.

I'd go for green manures, straw or hay to add biomass. Unless, you have an excess amount of dirt from grading or such that needs to be relocated. Then, it might make sense. Just thinking out loud.

I remember my grandfather hoeing his garden shallowly, maybe an inch or two deep. The division between the two textures was suppose to help keep the deeper moisture from evaporating so fast. I have no idea if it helped or not but he always had a very productive garden.

I see your article is from a Canadian paper. They use different expressions than we use here in the U.S. They are talking about keeping the top soil in the row middles cultivated or stirred up shallow to keep it from getting hard. That way the sub soil will retain some moisture and the loose top will work much like mulch and help keep it from drying out so deeply during hot dry weather, it will also help keep down small weeds.. Also with the middles broken up, if it rains there will be less run off. I don't know about blowing dust on your plants. Anyone that has ever gardened next to a dirt road in Okla. can tell you that your plants will not look much like they enjoy it. Your plants might be happier with a straw or grass mulch. It seems that after plants are cultivated the first time or two they will show some growth.

Personally I'm going to forget that I ever read that. LOL

Thanks everyone. Every one of you made valid points. I always try to make lemonade when presented with lemons. Sometimes my ideas simply don't work.

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
― Thomas A. Edison

Darn, and I had these visions of crop dusters spreading mulch from the sky dancing in my head … in hopes that St. Isidore soon would be there …

dave

johnnycoleman, Mulching works fine on small gardens but on 10 acre and bigger fields it is just not practical or easy, but cultivating between the rows is. The article just wasn't clear what it meant. I'm sure you are doing just fine the way you are. All the magazines & collages are now days advocate no till of any kind farming. Which sounds good but if you don't then you have to do something to keep the weeds & grass down. Growing vegetables on the scale that you vision, cultivation is called for. I admire what you are trying to do to help people.

Auther,

Wish me luck. This enterprise may out grow my capacity to manage sooner rather than later.

Johnny

My instant response when I read this was "No, Johnny, No" but I didn't laugh.

It may or may not come as a surprise to anyone that the process of dust mulching (and its failure to work as expected) was a big contributing factor to The Dust Bowl years of the 1930s that eroded an area of roughly 100 million acres. So, when someone mentions dust mulching, I just cringe because those years showed us that dust mulch does not help maintain soil moisture and it does not prevent the soil from blowing away. Research done since then just confirms that.

I know some people who like dust mulching and rely upon it, although I've always wondering if it is the dust mulch itself or the constant cultivation done to maintain the dust that keeps the weeds down.

I think that there are some parts of the US, for example, where dust mulching works because they tend to have more rainfall in the growing season than we do here and they tend to have less rowdy wind. With more moisture and less strong winds, their dust stays where it is supposed to and works well enough to make them happy. It still is labor-intensive though, and still leaves the soil vulnerable to wind and rain erosion if the rain stops falling. That's one reason no-till farming and no-till gardening have become more popular nowadays--because they work and prevent the erosion of valuable agricultural soil.

I had dust mulch here for a few years and hated it. I did nothing to encourage it and did everything I could to bury the dust under straw and hay mulch, but the dust mulch just kept coming. Why? Because our road was merely a dirt road when we bought this place. Every time a vehicle went up or down the road, a new layer of dust was deposited on everything---not just the garden, but the lawn, the trees, the porch, the picnic table...you name it, it got dusted. This went on for several years and it made it almost impossible to grow good lettuce, spinach and other greens. Even after triple-washing and triple-spinning the greens in the salad spinner, there always seemed to be some gritty dust or dirt on them that I couldn't wash away. It drove me crazy. Eventually our dirt road was upgraded to a gravel road, but all that meant was that we had lighter, whiter dust mulch. Now we have a paved road (barely paved, but paved nonetheless) and I don't have much unwelcome dust in my garden. Well, unless the wind blows in some dust, as it often does.

My dad's family farmed before, during and after the Dust Bowl years in Texas just one county across the Red River from the western end of the county where I live now. It was a hard life. They did use dust mulch in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly because it was all they had. They rarely had enough of a crop to sell any of it for cash, so had to rely solely on what they raised. In the Dust Bowl and Great Depression years, they couldn't raise enough to eat, a common problem for sustenance farmers at that time. They got really good at making meals out of almost nothing, and many weeds were harvested and eaten because it was better than having nothing to eat. My dad told me that World War II saved him and his brothers from starvation. When they went into the military, they had the assurance of having three square meals a day for the first time in their lives and they had food they never got to eat on the farm. After the war, no one went back to the farm because they'd gotten used to eating regularly and had developed a real fondness for it. Even when he was in his 70s and already had Alzheimer's Disease, my dad would fondly recall the excellent meals he had when he was in the Navy. He rarely talked about seeing the world, although he'd talk about Hawaii every now and then....but he loved to tell us about all that fine Navy food that put some meat on the bones of my dad and his super-skinny brothers. It sure beat eating dust and weeds.

We cannot blame the Dust Bowl solely on dust mulch, but it was one of the contributing factors, as were unscrupulous land speculators who sold people land for agricultural purposes that the speculators knew could not grow crops due to low rainfall. The then-common idea that "the rain follows the plow" also contributed to the Dust Bowl, as did a horrendous period of year after year with too little rainfall and too much wind. It didn't help that everyone plowed up more and more of the Great Plains to grow wheat (remember.....the dust mulch was supposed to hold the soil in place and the rain was supposed to follow the plow) in an area where people in the know understood that it was a rare year when enough rain fell to sustain wheat without irrigation.

So, when you mention dust mulch, those are the thoughts that run through my head---how it was a colossal failure, both here in OK and elsewhere, back then. I think of the people who died of dust pneumonia, the animals who were smothered from the inside out by breathing in the dust during dust storms, the big rolling clouds of dust that carried away so much great topsoil. I think of the lean, hungry faces of the Okies as they headed out of Oklahoma, often fleeing to California (but also to many other places) seeking a better life than they had found in Oklahoma and other states affected by the dust bowl. If dust mulch worked as advertised, maybe the Dust Bowl years wouldn't have been as bad as they were, but it didn't.

Nowadays, farmers and people who maintain large gardens use various methods to keep the weed level down and to keep the soil from blowing away. I prefer to use organic matter laid several inches thick on top of the soil surface as mulch, but I'm not attempting to garden on multiple acres. I also use living mulch and intercropping to prevent bare, open soil. Bare, open soil is always gonna sprout weeds because nature abhors a vacuum. If you leave soil bare, Mother Nature is gonna plant weeds there. Many organic farmers use a layer of paper or plastic mulch material in the actual growing rows to keep down the weeds that otherwise would spring up in the rows and compete with the crops for moisture and nutrients. Then, they either space their rows wide enough apart that they can use a cultivator to work the soil between the mulched rows or the use straw, hay or a similar material (or living mulch) in the space between the rows to prevent wees or, in the case of a living mulch, to prevent soil erosion.

I have friends here in my community who grew up hoeing (constantly) the family garden and farm land to maintain that lovely dust mulch and to keep the weeds down. To this day, they are not gardeners because they swore they'd never grow food crops again after a childhood spent hoeing to maintain that fine dust mulch. Who can blame them?

The ag extension agencies that once promoted dust mulching (as you've seen in some of the old documents you've found online) no longer seem to be in favor of it. We've all gotten older, the years have rolled on, and research has found better ways to prevent weeds. If dust mulching had worked as well as they once thought that it would, it still would be in wide use today. Now it stays alive a little on farms and in gardens here and there, but it is basically a relic of a past that no one wants to return to.

In the years since 2011, with recurring drought, we have seen some dust storms here and there in Oklahoma, particularly in north central, north western and western OK. Usually on the days I can turn on our evening news and see video of a dust storm in north central OK, I also will see video of wild fires burning somewhere in OK. I blame both on the droughts that have become far too frequent. Why are they happening now? Because a big rainfall deficit has turned the soil to dust and it is blowing away. Clearly, in this situation, the dust mulch isn't holding the dust and soil in place. That fact alone should (I hope) be enough to discourage anyone who wants to give dust mulching a try. I think the only reason we didn't see a repeat mini-Dust Bowl in 2011 and in the dry years since then is because we have conservation strips, contouring of the land to reduce erosion, no-till farming, cover crops, green manure crops, mulching with organic matter, well-established wind breaks, and better irrigation systems, etc. Until 2011, I thought that with all the more modern farming techniques now in use, we'd never see another event like The Dust Bowl. After dust starting blowing across the Great Plains in 2011, I had to rethink that.

Before you resort to dust mulch, I suggest you read Timothy Egan's wonderful book about the Dust Bowl years. It is called "The Worst Hard Time" and I reread it every single summer. Reading it helps remind me that no matter how fierce our drought may seem, and no matter how hard it seems to be to get good harvests in the all-too-common drought summers, they had it so much worse back then. It helps me look at the current drought challenges in proper perspective. What we have to deal with now, even in our worst hot, dry summers, is nothing compared to what they dealt with then.

I'm all about NOT having dust, Johnny, so I implore you to find another way. While dust mulch might seem to work, it cannot prevent the erosion of your soil, which is a much bigger issue than weeds.

Dawn