My relationship with mulch has long been fraught with equal amounts of love, hate, drama and boredom, not to mention a lot of heavy lifting. Did I mention guilt? Guilt clings to mulch like barnacles on a ship’s hull. Around this time five years ago, I arranged for a truckload of shredded cedar mulch to be delivered to the rear of my driveway. Around this time three years ago I got the last of it shoveled onto the beds. For the two intervening years, I felt guilty about the mulch pile every single day.
Apart from its role in producing self-inflicted mulch torture, this ground-covering substance is a great thing for the garden. I recommend it to everyone. Mulch acts as a cozy blanket for the soil, protecting it from temperature extremes, retaining moisture and keeping down weeds. Organic mulches break down over time, conditioning and feeding the earth underneath. Ultimately, putting down mulch saves time, and most gardeners I know consider time even more precious than the perfect tomato or Himalayan blue poppy.
You save the most time—not to mention muscle aches–if you hire a group of garden laborers to put down the mulch. Unfortunately my cottage-style landscape is not a good candidate for contract mulchers. The beds and borders are full of plants in various stages of growth and development. Even the best hired mulchers tend to fling the stuff around with abandon, blanketing everything in sight. Some of my plants probably wouldn’t survive the onslaught. Of course you can run along after the mulchers, clearing the excess off vulnerable plants, but if you have to do that much running and bending, you might as well spread the mulch yourself, saving money that you can use to buy even more plants.
Ever since the Giant Mulch Pile Debacle of 2010-2012, I have gone back to the old way of acquiring mulch, buying it in two or three-cubic yard bags. At the big box stores you save a small amount of money, but the mulch—stacked sky-high on pallets and exposed to the elements–is more likely to be wet and heavy. That heaviness becomes extremely obvious when you lug the floppy bags to your car and heft them into the trunk. At the garden centers, the mulch bags have probably been protected from the elements by tarps and are less wet and heavy. The employees will also lug the bags for you, so you don’t have to handle them until you get home.
Earlier this spring I started the annual rite of buying several bags of mulch at a time from the garden center. Despite the fact that it was early in the season and I had employees loading the bags in the parking lot, I began feeling the symptoms of mulch fatigue. The weeds in my garden sensed this and doubled their growth rate. Something had to be done.
Then, just like in the ads, my neighbor told me about something new—or at least relatively new—compressed coconut coir bricks.
Coir is a by-product of coconut processing and is made from the fibers that form the outer husk of the coconut. Produced in countries where coconuts grow, like India and Sri Lanka, it is dried and compressed into bricks, which are easy to stack and ship. I bought several five-kilogram bricks, each of which expands to cover about the same space as a two-cubic yard bag of cedar mulch. Each brick was about 75 percent lighter than a mulch bag, but more than twice the price. In the interest of science and saving my back, I decided to give it a try anyway.
Coir must be rehydrated before use. I plopped one brick in a large plastic tub, placed it under the garden spigot and poured in several gallons of water. After about an hour, it had absorbed the water and expanded to between five and seven times its original volume. I knew the coir was ready to use when I tried to lift the tub and found it was just as heavy as a bag of wet mulch. I dragged loads of coir to the appropriate garden beds and applied it, cursing myself roundly for not putting the brick in a wheelbarrow prior to hydration. Once the coir was down, it looked almost identical to shredded bark mulch.
Coir was originally marketed as a soil amendment and sustainable alternative to peat moss, and it has increased in popularity over the last decade. One of my favorite online/catalog garden vendors has switched from plastic shipping pots to vessels made of molded coir, advertising the reduction in plastic waste and the benefit of planting the new arrivals “pot and all.”
Having put down both bagged, shredded cedar mulch and coir, I will now compare their performance over the season. I suspect that both will stay in place and present an identical appearance once weathered in. The coir is pH neutral, while the bark mulch is slightly acidic, but I doubt this will make a difference to the majority of my plants. Coir may hold a bit more moisture, but I will know for certain when I observe how identical plants perform in each medium. The important thing is that the earth, which, at the moment, is bone dry due to lack of rain, is covered and the weeds are suppressed. Since the chickweed and onion grass mock me at every turn, this is good for my psyche.
Has coir put an end to my mulch drama? The jury is still out. If coir proves effective at dampening the drama and the weeds while covering the exposed soil, the cost of peace will be high. However, many good things in life—European vacations, really fine chocolates and true love—tend to be expensive. Most likely I will use a combination of coir and bagged mulch to balance out cash and energy expenditure.
For some reason, poets have largely avoided the subject of mulch and it remains for some talented versifier to remedy that omission. Mulch, with all its attendant issues, is obviously a metaphor for life itself.