I am helping with a very young food forest at a local a primary school.
It's been planted without a 'masterplan' and there's quite a bit of retrospective design happening...
It's important that it looks 'tidy-ish' and at the moment it looks really messy: there's still grass etc in there, which is kind of mowed by the maintenance guy and kind of not, so long, short, scraggly and so on.
The current thought is to sheet mulch the entire, large, food forest.
Thing is, I'll be wanting to broadcast a
ton of seed, and that would require
tons of
compost on top of the card.
Seeding on top of card going into our summer sounds like a recipe for dried-out plants.
Has anyone tried a side-by-side experiment of sheet mulching and...what'd you call it: 'managed groundcover succession'?
There's a couple of very difficult plants in there: kikiyu, which is a really aggressive running grass, and buttercup (Ranunculus repens), which loves the wet, acidic soil.
I'm pretty sure sheet mulching won't kill the kikiyu, probably not buttercup either.
I'm wondering whether scalping the whole thing, digging the buttercup, forking up the soil a bit, overseeding with a beneficial poyculture, and just trying to keep the kikiyu back from the trees etc.
I'd love to hear your experiences; I've never worked on this scale and I'm very keen for any ideas, even vaguely related!