Every day I take a long walk around my neighborhood to allay the claustrophobia that comes with “shelter in place” confinement. As I walk along I observe that almost every single house has at least one mail order package waiting on the front porch. I am reminded of the refrain of the Rolling Stones’ song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. It goes, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you find you get what you need.” I would amend that to read, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you find you get what you need—from Amazon.”
What I need now is mulch. Lots and lots of mulch.
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 any kind of mulch like barnacles on a ship’s hull. Years ago, I arranged for a truckload of shredded cedar mulch to be delivered to the rear of my driveway. Two years later I got the last of it shoveled onto the beds. Believe me when I tell you that I felt guilty about the mulch pile every single day.
Apart from its role in producing guilt and muscle aches, 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. Putting down mulch also 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 back pain–if you hire a group of garden laborers to put down the mulch. Sadly my eccentric 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 I could run along after the mulchers, clearing the excess off vulnerable plants, but if I have to do that much running and bending, I might as well spread the mulch myself and save the money for yet another tantalizing rosebush or alluring salvia.
Ever since the Giant Mulch Pile Debacle, I have gone back to the old way of acquiring mulch, buying several two or three-cubic yard bags at a time. 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 extremely heavy. That heaviness becomes painfully 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 water-laden. The employees will also lug the bags for you, so you don’t have to handle them until you get home.
“Shelter in place” started just as I was about to embark on the annual rite of buying several bags of mulch at a time from the garden center. Wanting to keep to the letter of the restrictions, I decided to try something new before the weeds in my garden got wind of the opportunities inherent in the current situation and doubled their growth rate. I decided to order some 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 light and 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 shredded cedar mulch. Each brick was about 75 percent lighter than a mulch bag, but more than twice the price. In the interest of saving my back and avoiding virus exposure, I decided to give it a try anyway.
Coir must be rehydrated before use. I plopped one brick in an old plastic trash barrel, placed it under the garden spigot and poured in several gallons of water. After about an hour and a little more water, it had 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 that 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. It has increased in popularity over the last decade and now pops up in all kinds of products. 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 being able to plant the newly arrived specimens “pot and all.”
Coir has many of the same virtues as more conventional mulches. Both 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 makes a difference to the majority of my plants. Coir probably holds a bit more moisture, but similar plants perform equally well in each medium. The important thing is that the earth is covered, the plants are insulated from temperature extremes 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? Probably not. Coir is effective at dampening the weeds while covering the exposed soil, but the cost of that effectiveness is high. I remind myself that many good things in life—European vacations, really fine chocolates and true love—tend to be expensive. Still, once we emerge from the current situation, I will most likely revert to bagged mulch to conserve cash in the coming economic difficulties. Cedar mulch also smells better and I like to think that it deters at least a few varmints.
So right now I can’t always get what I want, so I order coir bricks. Eventually I will get the shredded cedar that I need.