Ornamental Grasses Chop And Drop Mulching - IB2DWs - February 2025

'Tis the season for the start of garden cleanup.  Well...it is probably too early to do MOST of the cleanup, but I did start with a few 'chop and drop' experiments. First, I cleaned up a couple of Autumn Moor Grasses in the new front porch bed extension.  Then, I moved on to the raised vegetable bed on our back patio.  

The most recent little slice of the garden that I started clean-up on was hinted in this post showing the tulip tips from earlier this week.  Those tulips are down near the sidewalk in the IB2DWs (extended) bed.  That's also where we have (now) two Panicum grasses (I divided one that was struggling last Fall) and the 'mystery' blue-ish Moor Grass that I moved out from the front porch bed. 

I clipped off the grasses at the ground and cut them up into smaller pieces.  And, like the other areas of the garden, I left them in place to provide a light mulch layer.  See below for a couple of photos showing this area: 

This has always been a 'hard to grow' area for our garden due to the poor soil conditions.  Between the roots of the large Hackberry tree, the VERY shallow layer of soil and TONS of gravel and fist-sized rocks that were installed as part of our driveway construction, the soil has been a multi-year project.  I've added compost and municipal biosolids along with mulch over the years.  But, it isn't a quick-fix.  

While it isn't going to change things overnight, here's hoping that this grass litter will begin to feed the soil a little bit and keep that soil-improvement process moving along.