{"id":3044,"date":"2020-05-04T06:33:34","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T14:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=3044"},"modified":"2020-05-04T06:33:34","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T14:33:34","slug":"the-great-mulch-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/the-great-mulch-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Mulch Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mulch\"<\/a>Every day I take a long walk around my neighborhood to allay the claustrophobia that comes with \u201cshelter in place\u201d confinement.\u00a0 As I walk along I observe that almost every single house has at least one mail order package waiting on the front porch.\u00a0 I am reminded of the refrain of the Rolling Stones\u2019 song, \u201cYou Can\u2019t Always Get What You Want\u201d.\u00a0 It goes, \u201cYou can\u2019t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you find you get what you need.\u201d\u00a0 I would amend that to read, \u201cYou can\u2019t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you find you get what you need\u2014from Amazon.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I need now is mulch.\u00a0 Lots and lots of mulch.<\/p>\n

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? \u00a0Guilt clings to any kind of mulch like barnacles on a ship\u2019s hull. \u00a0Years ago, I arranged for a truckload of shredded cedar mulch to be delivered to the rear of my driveway. \u00a0Two years later I got the last of it shoveled onto the beds. \u00a0Believe me when I tell you that I felt guilty about the mulch pile every single day.<\/p>\n

Apart from its role in producing guilt and muscle aches, this ground-covering substance is a great thing for the garden. \u00a0I recommend it to everyone. Mulch acts as a cozy blanket for the soil, protecting it from temperature extremes, retaining moisture and keeping down weeds. \u00a0Organic mulches break down over time, conditioning and feeding the earth underneath. \u00a0Putting down mulch also 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 back pain\u2013if you hire a group of garden laborers to put down the mulch. \u00a0Sadly my eccentric cottage-style landscape is not a good candidate for contract mulchers. \u00a0The beds and borders are full of plants in various stages of growth and development. \u00a0Even the best hired mulchers tend to fling the stuff around with abandon, blanketing everything in sight. \u00a0Some of my plants probably wouldn\u2019t survive the onslaught. \u00a0Of 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0At the big box stores you save a small amount of money, but the mulch\u2014stacked sky-high on pallets and exposed to the elements\u2013is more likely to be wet and extremely heavy.\u00a0 That heaviness becomes painfully obvious when you lug the floppy bags to your car and heft them into the trunk. \u00a0At the garden centers, the mulch bags have probably been protected from the elements by tarps and are less water-laden. \u00a0The employees will also lug the bags for you, so you don\u2019t have to handle them until you get home.<\/p>\n

\u201cShelter in place\u201d 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. \u00a0Wanting 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.\u00a0 I decided to order some compressed 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. \u00a0Produced 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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0Each brick was about 75 percent lighter than a mulch bag, but more than twice the price. \u00a0In the interest of saving my back and avoiding virus exposure, I decided to give it a try anyway.<\/p>\n

Coir must be rehydrated before use. \u00a0I plopped one brick in an old plastic trash barrel, placed it under the garden spigot and poured in several gallons of water.\u00a0 After about an hour and a little more water, it had expanded to between five and seven times its original volume. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0I 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.\u00a0 It has increased in popularity over the last decade and now pops up in all kinds of products. \u00a0One 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 \u201cpot and all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coir has many of the same virtues as more conventional mulches.\u00a0 Both 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 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. \u00a0The important thing is that the earth is covered, the plants are insulated from temperature extremes and the weeds are suppressed. \u00a0Since 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? \u00a0Probably not.\u00a0 Coir is effective at dampening the weeds while covering the exposed soil, but the cost of that effectiveness is high. \u00a0I remind myself that many good things in life\u2014European vacations, really fine chocolates and true love\u2014tend to be expensive. \u00a0Still, once we emerge from the current situation, I will most likely revert to bagged mulch to conserve cash in the coming economic difficulties.\u00a0 Cedar mulch also smells better and I like to think that it deters at least a few varmints.<\/p>\n

So right now I can\u2019t always get what I want, so I order coir bricks.\u00a0 Eventually I will get the shredded cedar that I need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every day I take a long walk around my neighborhood to allay the claustrophobia that comes with \u201cshelter in place\u201d confinement.\u00a0 As I walk along I observe that almost every single house has at least one mail order package waiting on the front porch.\u00a0 I am reminded of the refrain of the Rolling Stones\u2019 song, … 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":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[2293,2292,85,12,2291,2294],"class_list":["post-3044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-cedar-mulch","tag-coir-mulch","tag-garden-maintenance","tag-mulch","tag-soil-amendments","tag-weed-prevention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044","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=3044"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3046,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044\/revisions\/3046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}