I had a look through to see if anyone was writing about mulch, and couldn't see anything, so I thought I'd start a thread.
To me, mulch is really important in planning for my garden and healthy crops. Its one of the basics of an organic approach, I suppose - feed the soil and not the plant, though not all mulches are meant to rot into the soil, of course. It also cuts down on the need for watering, of course, and stops so many weeds growing up - there are still some, of course, because there always are, but also because you can't put mulch right up to a plant, not often anyway, that will often cause the stem/stalk to rot. Which would be a bad thing!
The first mulch in my garden was exactly that - not meant to rot. Slate chips, beautiful blue slate from North Wales, with a few little green stones every now and again. I have a trench between the paving of my patio and the house - when I got here, there were weeds and lots of horrible hidey holes for massive great spiders that regularly came into the house
Jump to a year later, and the trench has been weeded, excavated to the depth of two bricks. Then I put a permeable membrane down, to stop the roots of anything that *did* manage to take root, and washed the slate chips clear of mud before laying them down (they were recycled from my sister's garden). They look lovely now!
The second form of mulch, is leaves. Last autumn (fall in North America) I collected a total of 25 bin bags full of leaves, and left them to rot outside in the garden. They have to be wet when you put them in the bag, and you have to pierce holes in the bag to let little worms and whatnot in to do their work on the leaves. I've already used some, but they haven't yet decomposed fully, its true. That might be because nearly all of them are oak leaves - oaks are the single most common tree in my town, I only have one bag that isn't full of oak leaves. They'll add body to the soil, when I do put them on, and they'll help with water retentiveness and structure.
The third form is egg shells! I never throw an egg shell away - they go back into the box to start drying out, and when I've used all the eggs in that particular box, the shells get put into the oven while I'm warming it up for some cooking, and the eggbox goes into the recycling bin that my local town council collects.
I do have some more of that permeable membrane, which could be used as a mulch over soil in its own right, but I don't want to - I'm still not sure where all the bulbs are in this garden, and this locality as a whole is full of ground dwelling bees - I took a little video with my compact camera last summer, It just means I really don't fancy such a blanket mulch - I'd rather have a natural material.
Which brings me to the stuff sitting in bags on the patio! Bark mulch - lovely big chunks of the stuff. Not so lovely if you're thinking about it degrading into the soil, but it looks beautiful.
Anyway, thats what I'm doing.
What are other people using?
To me, mulch is really important in planning for my garden and healthy crops. Its one of the basics of an organic approach, I suppose - feed the soil and not the plant, though not all mulches are meant to rot into the soil, of course. It also cuts down on the need for watering, of course, and stops so many weeds growing up - there are still some, of course, because there always are, but also because you can't put mulch right up to a plant, not often anyway, that will often cause the stem/stalk to rot. Which would be a bad thing!
The first mulch in my garden was exactly that - not meant to rot. Slate chips, beautiful blue slate from North Wales, with a few little green stones every now and again. I have a trench between the paving of my patio and the house - when I got here, there were weeds and lots of horrible hidey holes for massive great spiders that regularly came into the house
Jump to a year later, and the trench has been weeded, excavated to the depth of two bricks. Then I put a permeable membrane down, to stop the roots of anything that *did* manage to take root, and washed the slate chips clear of mud before laying them down (they were recycled from my sister's garden). They look lovely now!The second form of mulch, is leaves. Last autumn (fall in North America) I collected a total of 25 bin bags full of leaves, and left them to rot outside in the garden. They have to be wet when you put them in the bag, and you have to pierce holes in the bag to let little worms and whatnot in to do their work on the leaves. I've already used some, but they haven't yet decomposed fully, its true. That might be because nearly all of them are oak leaves - oaks are the single most common tree in my town, I only have one bag that isn't full of oak leaves. They'll add body to the soil, when I do put them on, and they'll help with water retentiveness and structure.
The third form is egg shells! I never throw an egg shell away - they go back into the box to start drying out, and when I've used all the eggs in that particular box, the shells get put into the oven while I'm warming it up for some cooking, and the eggbox goes into the recycling bin that my local town council collects.
I do have some more of that permeable membrane, which could be used as a mulch over soil in its own right, but I don't want to - I'm still not sure where all the bulbs are in this garden, and this locality as a whole is full of ground dwelling bees - I took a little video with my compact camera last summer, It just means I really don't fancy such a blanket mulch - I'd rather have a natural material.
Which brings me to the stuff sitting in bags on the patio! Bark mulch - lovely big chunks of the stuff. Not so lovely if you're thinking about it degrading into the soil, but it looks beautiful.
Anyway, thats what I'm doing.
What are other people using?
