If you use mulch, it not only keeps the ground cool, weeds down and needs less watering, it also keeps the moisture in the garden more stable, so the plants grow better.
Yes, I have mulch around all my trees and in my ornamental gardens, in the form of large bark, and on the vegetable beds I use grass clippings. Aside from drought, we had days (think we had 23 in a row over 100) of record high temps accompanied by wind that was rarely below 20 mph most of the afternoon and early evening through June and July and even into early August. Trees I water monthly had to be watered daily even with mulch - I once let them go two days and a tree that has been in the ground 6 years looked like someone had taken a blow torch to it. The only blessing is that even bindweed was dying outside my tree wells. Inside them, in my gardens, and even under black plastic in full sun, it thrived. We have pulled feet of bindweed from beneath the black plastic that lines the floor of our crawl space - it can't get green because it gets no light, but it grows. Every year I say if I could figure out a way to make fuel from the stuff, I would be rich.
None of that stops the gophers of course - last year DH trapped (the kind that kills them) 23 gophers, this year 15 or 16, we lost count. They took out three lombardy poplars over two years in a row of five. One day three years ago we were standing on the front porch and one started sticking his head up out of a hole in the garden, and then back in - after the third time, DH got his BB gun, aimed at the hole and waited. Sure enough, up came that dastardly head again - DH got him with one shot right behind the eye. Not bad for an old guy who rarely shoots anything unless it's to kill a rattler too close to the house.
This property has been a much bigger challenge than we anticipated, but we tend to be stubborn - I'm Irish, he's German, and it is pretty hard to get us to quit on anything once we've committed to it. Some days, we can't stand each other, but we're still here
The year (09) we had a 30 minute hail storm that turned my best vegetable garden ever into what looked like a nuclear wasteland, I was ready to throw in the towel on gardening. I walked around my vegetable beds and just cried. It was June 13th, and no one had any tomato plants left, but one woman in town advised me to just wait and see if they recovered. She was right. I didn't get a great harvest, but I did get some tomatoes and peppers, and had seed to replant some root vegetables, and even the potatoes put on a fair production despite the fact I couldn't even see where they had been.
This year, the invasion of the grasshoppers is what finally got DH to relent and agree to some chickens. Funny thing is, by the time I got any, two pairs of Robins had just about decimated them feeding their young. We had thousands of them, I've never seen an infestation so bad, and one day I came home and there were two Robins on the front lawn just standing there, then one snatched a grasshopper, knocked off its legs, and flew off to a nest. The second did the same. Two others showed up as they were leaving and did the same. They must have done it all day, every day for, well, probably just about three weeks, I think that's the age the young fledge.
At this point, if we believed in rain dances, we would learn them and do them, and not care how ridiculous we looked
We're 1000 feet from the road, who's gonna' see anyway?
