two reasons to mulch

mulched-fig

One of the week­end gar­den projects was to put down some mulch around a cou­ple of the fruit trees. I’d resisted doing it ear­lier because I’d been using the bare ground at the edge of the lit­tle orchard as a place to sow var­i­ous annual wild­flower seeds–clarkia, baby blue eyes, pop­pies, fun things like that. Mulch would have pre­vented the seed from germinating.

A lit­tle gar­den of annual wild­flow­ers sounds really cool, but it’s a lot of work to keep going. Bare ground dur­ing the wet win­ter and spring weather is an open invi­ta­tion for all the dor­mant weed seeds to set up house, and keep­ing the bed weeded was a several-day-a-week chore.

Add to that that we’re re try­ing to do more to con­serve water. Mulching around the trees to con­serve water was mak­ing too much sense to not do. Come win­ter I’ll be glad for the reduced weeding.

dudleya-and-senecio

The raised bed with the fruit trees still con­tains some orna­men­tals near the edges, and I mulched up to near the edges of most of them. This is the local Dud­leya edulis, com­bined with blue chalk fin­gers, Senecio man­dralis­cae, from South Africa.

dichondra-and-poppy

Some of the other plants in the bed were so low-growing that mulching would have cov­ered them entirely. I left a cou­ple lit­tle patches of the native Dichon­dra occi­den­talis with mulch only at the edges. Hope­fully the plant will be able to grow up through the mulch a bit.

buckwheat-seedling-with-mulch

This lit­tle San Miguel Island buck­wheat seedling was large enough to not bury, but a cou­ple seedlings nearby were specks in the dirt that would have never seen the light of day.

buckwheat-goalposts

For these tini­est seedlings, I left the ground bare. In addi­tion I erected a cou­ple lit­tle goal­posts to mark the loca­tion so I wouldn’t stomped on when I walk through or pull them out think­ing they’re a weed. It’s a tech­nique I use when­ever I plant some seeds in the open ground. The lit­tle upright twigs usu­ally stay around long enough for the seeds to ger­mi­nate and get to a safe size.

I’ll miss the lit­tle meadow in the spring months, but not the weed­ing. And I feel bet­ter that the fig and plum will be able to get by with a lit­tle less water. Come fall, if I decide I’d still like some annu­als to liven up a gar­den spot with the bare branches of the trees over­head, there really wouldn’t be any­thing stop­ping me from clear­ing lit­tle patches of dirt through the mulch, sow­ing some wild­flow­ers, and erect­ing lit­tle goal­posts to pro­tect the plants from maraud­ing gardeners.

Hmm. I’m not sure why it took me so long to do this…

July 20 2009 05:53 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • •

5 Responses to “two reasons to mulch”

  1. tina on 20 Jul 2009 at 7:28 am #

    Mulch is so good. Now I finally know what that weed is that keeps sprout­ing in my garden-buckwheat!

  2. Town Mouse on 20 Jul 2009 at 5:18 pm #

    I’ve actu­ally mulched every­thing, partly for the tidy look, and must say that I’ve still seen a lot of weeds last spring. A real weed won’t mind 4–5 inches of mulch. I pulled and pulled. Maybe it would have been worse with­out mulch. Now, though, the weeds have dried out and are quiet.

    I’ll be curi­ous how it works out for you. Clarkia and Cal Pop­pies are weedy enough to grow through mulch, but I’m grow­ing other annu­als in pots.

  3. lostlandscape on 20 Jul 2009 at 7:09 pm #

    Tina, you should be so lucky as to have some cool buck­wheat weeds!

    Town Mouse, I applied thick mulch to two large areas a year ago, and I’ll say that the dif­fer­ence was huge from the areas with mulch ver­sus those with­out. It wasn’t an end to weed­ing by any means, but the chores went way down. I’m glad to hear that clarkias and pop­pies will make their way through mulch lay­ers. I guess I shouldn’t be sur­prised with pop­pies since they’re peren­ni­als com­ing up from root, but it’ll be nice to see the annual clarkias return.

  4. jeff-naturehills on 23 Jul 2009 at 1:33 pm #

    I mulch every spring and fall. Keeps weeds under con­trol, helps keep the soil tem­per­a­ture more even and saves on water­ing. Plus, I like the looks of a mulched bed. Seems to tie to nature so well.

  5. BeWaterWise Rep on 29 Sep 2009 at 1:39 am #

    Mulching is a great way to save water while gar­den­ing. It helps to save gal­lons of water by reduc­ing water evap­o­ra­tion from the soil. It helps trap soil mois­ture thus reduc­ing the need to water the plants on a daily basis. For more tips on water-wise gar­den­ing, refer http://j.mp/n8Okj

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply