Experiments with wood chips

It's been windy and a bit too cold this past week;  despite some rain, the wind has really dried the soil a lot.  Our walk to the daughter's school is far less muddy through the country park than it has been all winter.  

I'm continuing to sheet mulch the allotment, piece by piece.  As I mentioned previously, some of the mulch is wood chips, only available on site since last summer.  As an experiment, I heavily mulched my Musselbrugh leeks in the autumn and I notice their bed is the least weedy.  There is probably about six inches of wood chips on this bed, with the leeks growing through out of the soil underneath.  Their stalks were lovely, long and white (normally I don't earth them up or do anything special to blanch them) and surprisingly no sign of allium leaf miner.  This pest has always attacked my leeks and garlic, but maybe the deep mulch prevented them finding the leeks this year?  The garlic bed is right next to the leek bed and it only got a light mulch of straw, but I won't know if the garlic bulbs are affected till I harvest them in June.

I also noticed some nettles starting to grow at the very edge of the leek bed next to the path, where the wood chips were only put down shallowly.  As I was pulling them out, the few nettles in the deep mulch only took a tiny tug to extract a long root, whereas the shallow mulch nettles had a very firm grasp and didn't budge.  I'll definitely keep this in mind as I continue my wood chip mulch experiments.

We're just starting our two week spring break from school and work--even the husband has the time off, but unluckily he also can't walk due to an ankle fracture.  So I won't be getting any work out of him--the son will have to step up a bit.  There's plenty to do both at home in the garden and at the allotment and it needs to be done now, before spring is over.