This year we will be gardening with seaweed! Across the street from our house is the ocean with its abundant supply of eelgrass that washes up onto the shore with each high tide. The winter storms have pushed the eelgrass far up on the beach where normal tides won't be able to pull it back, so we decided to collect our very first batch today.
Armed with a garbage can and a few pails, we made our way out to a spot where the eelgrass was piled high. We didn't expect it to be frozen and the top layer was hard to collect, but once we got to the thawed bottom layers we were able to collect quite a bit.
Collecting it in the fall would be optimal as it would have time to break down over the winter, in order to be tilled into the soil in the spring. Seaweed is one of the most ideal materials for fertilizing and composting.
We plan to use the seaweed for mulch around our tomato and pepper plants once the soil has warmed up. We will also use it to cover some hilly areas where mowing is a problem, to kill the grass and prepare the soil for a flowering ground cover.