Evaporation is the enemy. Whether by sun or wind it is to be avoided. One of my favourite videos is a lecture on mulch by Dr Linda Chalker-Scott where she goes into the details of what mulch is best for reforestation work. She recommends chunky woodchip mulch to a depth of 30cm. Eventually of course, this material in incorporated into the soil, but in that time trees can establish themselves. I have used a combination of chunky woodchip mulch and a living mulch. I was inspired by a garden tour of Geoff Lawton’s Jordanian site where he uses a succulent ground cover as a living mulch. Unfortunately, I couldn’t identify the specific variety or find anything similar looking in Australia. What I did find was a very vigorous form of pigface. I picked up a cheeky cutting from a garden path at a beach-side shack I stayed at one Easter holiday. It’s happy in my clay soil and impressively vigorous in its growth habit, but lacks the angular fruit of the Chilean variety, it also had a red blush to the stems and light purple flowers. Because if this, I suspect my variety may be a hybrid of the Australian, and Chilean or South African varieties. I’ve been able to get away with a much thinner layer of chunky woodchip mulch knowing that I effectively have another 10cm of material on top colonising the garden beds.
My pigface has been very well behaved. It’s easy to propagate, I simply take a cutting from a larger plant, about 20cm to 30cm long and bury 2/3 of it in the ground. This gives the pigface a huge area from which to develop roots. If I were to estimate, I’d say that my various cuttings have grown to between 60cm and 1m in diameter depending on their placement. The mother plant seems unfazed by my semi-regular I suspect the quality of my soil is quite variable and there is a notably damp and dry side to the yard of my house. My dear friend Dr Shane Simonsen is always advocating the need for zero input agriculture, and in fairness, wood chips are expensive in the volumes I require. So while I’m willing to cheat a little to establish my gardens, I hope that the pigface will eventually be verdant enough to shoulder the burden of providing ground cover enough to prevent the wicked evaporation that we suffer in the summer.
So far my experiment has seemed to work. I suspect as the year progresses and we move into summer my pigface will be completely established, creating a dense mat of green chunky and I’ll be better able to judge its efficacy in keeping the landscape hydrated.
