The melons needed mulch. And all I had was a big pile of weeds, which didn’t seem appropriate, somehow. Then I had a little lightbulb-over-the-head kind of idea.

In the garage sat 10 garbage bags of raw wool. We picked these up last fall after a farmer posted them on a “free” list. At the time, I thought it would be great fun to learn how to spin wool into yarn. But as often happens, I didn’t get around to it. Instead, we stored them in the bed of the pickup for months and months.

I’d recently read about Woolch, a Minnesota-made mulch that is a blend of wool fibers and wood toothpick shavings — both byproduts of other industries. Woolch could do two cool things: reduce the need for herbicides and pesticides in commercial growing operations, and provide a new market for wool producers.

So I thought, why not use those bags of wool now sitting in my garage as mulch for the melons?

Puffed up with smartness, I ripped open the first bag, and gently distributed the downy wool around the stem of the melon. I marveled at how beautiful and soft the wool was. When I got to the bottom of the bag, I found an index card with the name “Truffle.” The wool in the second bag was donated by “Tinker.” I never got past the second bag.

Truffle and Tinker are registered Merino sheep from Stone Soup Farm in Wilson, Wisconsin. It seemed wrong to take their wonderful wool and use it for something so pedestrian like mulch. Handspun neckscarves or mittens seemed right. I might have to learn to do that after all.

As for the mulch, I put the bagger on the trim mower and the melons are now getting a good layer of clippings. Just not sheep clippings.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 9:50 am and is filed under Compost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.