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[Note: "Live from Prairie Lights" is a live, and broadcast, series of public presentations by authors visiting Iowa City, Iowa, jointly sponsored by Prairie Lights Books and Iowa Public Radio, and usually held (as was this one) at the Prairie Lights Books store in Iowa City. On this occasion Mary Swander (author of the collection Bloom and Blossom) was joined by two of her contributors, Barbara Moss and Carl Klaus. The three of them took questions from the audience. This is a brief excerpt from that Q and A session that includes a question put by Nicholas Johnson. The remarks of Mary Swander, Barbara Moss and Carl Klaus are Copyright © 1997 by each of them.]
Nicholas Johnson: Some twenty years ago when I was trying to maintain two gardens in Washington DC and two in Iowa simultaneously [laughter] I became a great enthusiast of mulch. [laughter] None of the three of you said anything about mulch this evening [laughter], and I wonder if that's because during the last twenty years everyone has started to mulch and it's no more exciting than no-till farming, or . . ..
Mary Swander: No, mulch is very exciting [laughter]. That is a hot topic with me, thank you. I'm a big mulcher. My garden is in the Ruth Stout method where you just fling everything. You don't have a compost heap, you just throw your garbage right on the garden. It works amazingly well. It's not exactly the tidiest system. I don't have any, well, yes I do, one close neighbor. They tolerate a lot from me. But one year I had everything all mulched down just great, I thought, for the winter. And then it was a windy day in the spring and I was on my way out the door to go to Iowa City to the theater. I was all dressed up. And I looked and my garden was on fire. I called my neighbors. "I need some help over here. My garden is on fire." And they were like, "OK, now what is it? Now what does the nut want? She must be mistaken. It's her house, not her garden, that's on fire." Some spark actually lit up the mulch in my garden and it was on fire. We were out there like little fire fighters putting it out with a rag rug, and a hose, and a shovel. But we did it. So got to be careful with that mulch [laughter], is my advice.
Mary Englander: I was going to say you can never have enough mulch, but I suppose that's not true. Do you have any comments about mulch [laughter]?
Carl Klaus: I think that Nick was asking us to declare our faith, to stand up and be counted [laughter]. So, of course, I mulch [laughter]. I have always mulched. I was born a mulcher [laughter]. But you got to be careful with that mulch. Now, this is the kind of season where you want to fret a little bit about exactly when you put the mulch on [laughter]. If you put mulch on now, in June, in this cool, wet season we have, on your tomatoes, and your pepper plants and your eggplants, what you're going to do is lock in all that cold. So you want to let the ground warm up a bit before you put the mulch down this season. Everything is two to three weeks late. Ordinarily I'd be putting my mulch down in about a week or two, but I don't think I'm going to be putting my mulch down for maybe two or three weeks [laughter] unless it warms up a bit very quickly. I'm not only a person who believes in the ruler, but also the thermometer [laughter]. So if you come out there to my garden any time in the next few weeks you might find me with a thermometer testing the soil.
Barbara Moss: I don't have a mulch story, but I will tell you one about the ruler. . . .
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