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.\u00a0 Did I mention guilt?\u00a0 Guilt clings to mulch like barnacles on a ship\u2019s hull.\u00a0 Around this time five years ago, I arranged for a truckload of shredded cedar mulch to be delivered to the rear of my driveway.\u00a0 Around this time three years ago I got the last of it shoveled onto the beds.\u00a0 For the two intervening years, I felt guilty about the mulch pile every single day.<\/p>\n
Apart from its role in producing self-inflicted mulch torture, this ground-covering substance is a great thing for the garden. \u00a0I recommend it to everyone.\u00a0 Mulch acts as a cozy blanket for the soil, protecting it from temperature extremes, retaining moisture and keeping down weeds.\u00a0 Organic mulches break down over time, conditioning and feeding the earth underneath.\u00a0 Ultimately, putting down mulch saves time, and most gardeners I know consider time even more precious than the perfect tomato or Himalayan blue poppy.<\/p>\n
You save the most time\u2014not to mention muscle aches–if you hire a group of garden laborers to put down the mulch.\u00a0 Unfortunately my cottage-style landscape is not a good candidate for contract mulchers.\u00a0 The beds and borders are full of plants in various stages of growth and development.\u00a0 Even the best hired mulchers tend to fling the stuff around with abandon, blanketing everything in sight.\u00a0 Some of my plants probably wouldn\u2019t survive the onslaught.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 At the big box stores you save a small amount of money, but the mulch\u2014stacked sky-high on pallets and exposed to the elements–is more likely to be wet and heavy.\u00a0 That heaviness becomes extremely obvious when you lug the floppy bags to your car and heft them into the trunk.\u00a0 At the garden centers, the mulch bags have probably been protected from the elements by tarps and are less wet and heavy.\u00a0 The employees will also lug the bags for you, so you don\u2019t have to handle them until you get home.<\/p>\n
Earlier this spring I started the annual rite of buying several bags of mulch at a time from the garden center.\u00a0 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. \u00a0\u00a0The weeds in my garden sensed this and doubled their growth rate.\u00a0 Something had to be done.<\/p>\n
Then, just like in the ads, my neighbor told me about something new\u2014or at least relatively new\u2014compressed coconut coir bricks.<\/p>\n
Coir is a by-product of coconut processing and is made from the fibers that form the outer husk of the coconut.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Each brick was about 75 percent lighter than a mulch bag, but more than twice the price.\u00a0 In the interest of science and saving my back, I decided to give it a try anyway.<\/p>\n
Coir must be rehydrated before use.\u00a0 I plopped one brick in a large plastic tub, placed it under the garden spigot and poured in several gallons of water.\u00a0 After about an hour, it had absorbed the water and expanded to between five and seven times its original volume.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Once the coir was down, it looked almost identical to shredded bark mulch.<\/p>\n
Coir was originally marketed as a soil amendment and sustainable alternative to peat moss, and it has increased in popularity over the last decade.\u00a0 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 \u201cpot and all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having put down both bagged, shredded cedar mulch and coir, I will now compare their performance over the season.\u00a0 I suspect that both will stay in place and present an identical appearance once weathered in.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Since the chickweed and onion grass mock me at every turn, this is good for my psyche.<\/p>\n
Has coir put an end to my mulch drama?\u00a0 The jury is still out.\u00a0 If coir proves effective at dampening the drama and the weeds while covering the exposed soil, the cost of peace will be high.\u00a0 However, many good things in life\u2014European vacations, really fine chocolates and true love\u2014tend to be expensive.\u00a0 Most likely I will use a combination of coir and bagged mulch to balance out cash and energy expenditure.<\/p>\n
For some reason, poets have largely avoided the subject of mulch and it remains for some talented versifier to remedy that omission. \u00a0Mulch, with all its attendant issues, is obviously a metaphor for life itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 Did I mention guilt?\u00a0 Guilt clings to mulch like barnacles on a ship\u2019s hull.\u00a0 Around this time five years ago, I arranged for a truckload of shredded cedar mulch to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[1176,1178,1174,12,1177,1175],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-coir","tag-easy-gardening","tag-ground-cover","tag-mulch","tag-shredded-cedar","tag-weed-supression"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}