Mulching does more than make a garden look neat.  It conserves water and helps keep weeds and diseases at bay.  It even helps fertilize the garden.  Read on for tips on mulching your garden.

Mother Nature’s Fertilizer

When you look at a forest that is undisturbed, you find a thick layer of leaves on the ground.  Those on the bottom of the pile are mostly decayed, while those on the top are fresh.  Over time, the decaying leaves become fertilizer for the trees and other plants in the forest.  This is how mother nature fertilizes and protects her plants.

When you plant a garden or flower bed, the first thing you do is clear away the dead leaves and vegetation.  Then you plant your garden.  If you are good at gardening, you have tilled the ground to a depth of six inches, then worked in three inches of compost.  This gives you a rich base in which to plant.

Do not stop there, however.  When you transplant something, mulch around it.  If you plant seeds, wait until they come up and are about three inches high, then mulch around them.

The benefits of mulch

Mulch helps hold the soil in place during a rain.  It keeps dirt from splashing on the leaves of the plant when it is being watered, or when it is raining, thus keeping down diseases.  Mulch helps hold water so that the plant can use it.  This cuts down on irrigation and avoids wasting water.  When your plants have fruits or vegetables, mulch keeps them clean and reduces insect damage from pill bugs and similar insects.  Finally, mulch insulates the plant crown and roots, keeping it cooler in the summer and warmer in the heat.

Mulch types

What to use?  Many cities chip the tree limbs they cut around power lines.  Some give that away free — you just have to go pick it up.  Others sell it.  That is one source of mulch.  You can buy it in bulk from landscape supply places, or buy small quantities from home and garden places.

Pine straw is often used as mulch.  It can acidify the soil, however, so be careful when using it.  Cocoa bark, from the tree that produces the chocolate bean, is also sold.  It and coconut husks are poisonous to dogs, so be careful if you use it.  Some people use plastic mulch, but it doesn’t work as well as straw or wood chips and isn’t as environmentally friendly.  Straw works and so does sawdust.  Most of the time, though, chipped-up tree limbs are used.

How much? 

The first year is expensive.  You need to put down 3-4 inches of mulch.  This will make it harder for the weeds to grow through, conserves water, and keeps your vegetables clean.  Every year after this, you add one inch of mulch to the top of the pile.  Over the course of a year, the bottom inch of the mulch decomposes, becoming fertilizer for your plants.  If you add an inch to the top each year, you maintain the mulch layer at the optimum depth and freshen up the appearance of the mulch.

Fertilizer and mulch

You will still need to add nitrogen fertilizer to your plants, but you should not have to add as much as if you did not have mulch.  If you are mulching something like a vegetable garden that starts over each year, straw is a better choice than wood chips.  After the garden is done, you can turn the straw into the soil and it will decompose during the winter to provide additional organic material in the spring for the new garden.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.