What Beginning Gardeners Need to Know about Mulching
by The Garden Site on March 19, 2009
in Gardening, Organic Gardening
Mulch is a layer of material spread on top of the soil to conserve soil moisture, discourage the growth of weeds, help prevent erosion and prevent large fluctuations in soil temperature. In other words, mulch modifies the soil micro-climate around your growing plants.
Ideally, mulch is light and permeable enough to allow water and air to pass through, yet dense enough to inhibit or eliminate the growth of weeds.
Mulches may be organic (usually plant material), mineral (crushed stone or gravel), or synthetic (plastics and geotextiles). Understanding their differences will help you choose the best mulch for your situation. Generally speaking, organic and mineral mulches cool the soil while synthetic mulches warm it up.
Any biodegradable material can be used as an organic mulch. Some of the most easily attainable materials include shredded or chipped bark, shredded leaves, hay, straw, and peat moss.
Avoid using whole leaves unless you mix them with straw or some other light material as they tend to mat down and get soggy. They can actually prevent water and air from reaching the soil beneath.
Grass clippings are an excellent choice of mulching material. They’re so small they start breaking down and enriching the soil almost immediately. If you do use grass clippings, be sure they don’t have pesticide residue on them. Many lawn treatments contain herbicides that kill broadleaf plants, including those that you may be trying to grow in your garden. And of course, if you’re mulching a vegetable garden you don’t want to be adding poisonous chemicals to it.
You may be fortunate enough to live near a source of industrial by-products that are useful for mulching. Some ideas are sawdust or shavings from sawmills, spent hops from breweries, or composted manure from mushroom growers.
Careful with the sawdust. It’s deficient in nitrogen so you might want to mix it with some compost. Also, softwood sawdust is acidic, so you don’t want to use it too close to plants that prefer a neutral or alkaline soil.
Advantages of mulching:
Mulched plant roots are not subjected to extreme temperatures. Unmulched roots get hot and dry in the summer and can be damaged by the heaving of soil during sudden frosts and thaws in winter.
Organic mulches and some mineral mulches contain nutrients that gradually wash down into the soil and fertilize the plant roots.
Weeding and hoeing the garden are practically eliminated when you mulch! The few weeds that manage to poke up through the mulch are easily nipped out, and there’s no need to cultivate because the mulch keeps the soil loose.
Mulch protects the soil from the drying action of the sun and wind, and protects it from erosion from wind and hard rain. Mulched plants can often endure a long dry spell with hardly any watering.
Mulch protects vegetables such as squash, cucumber, unstaked tomatoes or strawberries that lie on the ground when they’re ripe. The mulch keeps them clean and dry, preventing rot and mildew. Likewise, low growing flowers will not be splashed with mud in a mulched flower bed.
When not to mulch:
Seedlings planted in very moist soil should not be mulched until they are well established, as the higher soil moisture can encourage damping-off, a fungal infection that is usually fatal.
If the soil is waterlogged from spring rains, let it dry out a bit before mulching perennials to avoid crown rot, another fungal infection. It is best to leave an open circle a few inches in diameter around the base of each plant for air circulation.
Don’t mulch a low-lying, wet soil.
There’s too much to learn about mulching to fit it all into one article, but I hope you can see that mulching has great benefits for your garden and for you.
Your plants will benefit by having their roots protected from heat and dryness in the summer and from frost heaving in the winter, your soil will stay loose and friable, weeding will disappear off your chore list and you’ll save water too!
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My garden is totally and absolutely weed infested, and by mid-season, my veggies and flowers are strangled out and the weeds take over – All the weeding in the world doesn’t seem to help, it seems to make room for the stronger weeds to invade! I will try mulching this season, in a t least part of my garden, and if it is half as effective as folks claim, I expect a bumper crop for that section this year! Thanks for the godd advice, keep the tips coming, we are far from clear of the great republican depression G. Bush let happen, and will need even more gardens giving to the food banks this year! Mrs., Obama has got it right! She’s on her knees, weeding and feeding the nation, like every good mother we know! G d bless her soul, we need more like her to give us courage to carry on!
I agree with you Uncle B, Michelle Obama has got it right! What a great example for everyone, especially that they are doing it organic! The mulching should help you, basically Nature doesn’t like seeing bare soil. When it’s exposed to the sun and wind the tiny microorganisms that are so important to healthy soil can get destroyed, so she tries to cover bare soil – hence, weeds. But by mulching, you are covering up the soil too, protecting the microorganisms and feeding them as the mulch breaks down. You’ll get some weeds coming through, but it should be far fewer. The other thing that can help is planting your vegies closer together, basically crowding out the weeds. This is the strategy behind the French intensive and Square Foot Gardening techniques. Finally, weeds are not all bad! Okay, if they are crowding out your vegies, that’s not ideal, but they usually have much deeper tap roots than most of your vegies will and they bring up vital nutrients from deep within the soil, making those nutrients available to your vegies. So it’s okay for the weeds to share the space with the vegies – as long as they don’t crowd them out too much. Also, I really highly recommend planting Heirloom vegetables – they are usually hardier than most F1 hybrids, are certainly tastier (and more nutritious) and they allow you to become self-reliant as you can save the seeds and plant them the next year producing seedlings true to their parents. The F1 hybrids are designed to keep you reliant on the seed companies (many of whom are backed by the pesticide producing corporations) as the seeds will either not sprout at all or produce plants that are weak and sterile. The hybrids are also usually designed to ‘need’ chemical fertilizers and pesticides, in essence they are weaker plants.
You could also try planting low-growing, naturally spreading crops like heirloom oregano and marjoram between all your other plants. They will grow virtually year-round in some climates, they will spread into the gaps left between your other plants and if you can keep weeding until the herbs get a foothold they should keep the weeds under control. In our garden, the weeds don’t stand much of a chance against these 2 herbs which had a good head start due to mulching and weeding around them in the early days while they were getting established. Plus the big bonus is you end up with beautiful, aromatic fresh herbs to use in your cooking!
Hi, I am going to be mulching my gardens, mostly full of ornamental flowering plants such as gardenias and bird of paradise. Should I put down some fertilizer or organic compost prior to mulching?
Hi Natalie! Great question. If you are going into autumn/winter (assuming you are in the Northern Hemisphere) it’s a great time to lay down some compost, and then put the mulch on top of it. If you can get hold of some vermicast or worm tea that would be good too. I find that just those things, organic compost, manure, and vermicast or worm tea work great and there’s really no need for commercial fertilizers.