Mulch - What It Is & Why You Need It.

Mulch saves the lives of transplanted trees and so can save you from having to plant them all over again! 

You can buy two types of weed suppressing mulch fabric from us: either long strips of woven polypropylene for hedges or single biodegradable mats for trees.
We also sell the UK's finest organic, peat free mulch by RocketGro.
 

What is Mulch?

Mulch is almost anything that you use to cover the soil around a plant in order to:

1. Keep the sun off the soil.
2. Trap moisture in the soil while allowing water in.
3. Make it harder for weeds to grow.
4. Improve soil fertility (more on this point below)

If it is going to be hard to frequently water and weed your new plants after planting, then it is essential that you use mulch (if you want your plants to live!).
Please note that establishing plants must still be watered, but a good mulch will allow you to do it less often.

Homemade mulch can be made of pretty much any garden waste, including fresh grass clippings, autumn leaves, chipped or shredded wood, and if you don't mind the look, plain cardboard (not glossy) or newspaper, and old clothes, rugs or sheets, preferably made from natural fibre.

What is the best mulch?

The best mulches for flower beds and vegetable gardens, which will immediately release nutrients for hungry plants, are well rotted compost, manure, or leaf mould.
Cow, sheep, or goat manure is generally fine to use fresh, but horse manure should be aged for a year.

The "other best" mulch for many garden uses, especially around trees and shrubs, is barkchips, which look nice and last for a long time. They do not release much in the way of nutrients, but over time break down and become part of the soil.  

However, every mulch, even inorganic plastic mulch fabric, will do a lot to improve soil fertility simply by trapping moisture: moisture encourages soil life, which is essentially what humus in the soil is. 

But I was told that non-rotted mulch would rob nutrients from the soil?

There is a pervasive myth that things like fresh grass clippings or fresh woodchips will somehow suck nitrogen out of the soil when applied over the soil surface as mulch. 

This is based on an understandable misunderstanding: if those fresh materials were dug into the soil, then they would encourage prolific bacterial life that would indeed temporarily hog available nitrogen in their billions of little bacteria bodies. 
But that is impossible when the same fresh materials are spread over the soil surface as mulch. 

There is a related myth about chippings from conifers turning the soil acidic: if that were true, then the forest floor of every pine forest would be too acidic for anything to grow, probably including the pines themselves!
 

Why do you need Mulch?

A newly planted tree (especially a large one) is at risk because it has to grow new roots - these are vulnerable to competing weeds and or lack of water. Mulch holds back the weeds, shades the soil and traps water.

Over the long term, mulch can transform the worst soils into rich, deep, dark topsoil.

Mulch can even give you a summer holiday!

• If your new trees are well mulched, you can water them thoroughly and safely go away for a long weekend even in a heatwave.
• If you are going away for 7-10 days, you will need someone to come in & water everything well once in the middle, twice if your soil type is dry (like sandy soil).

How to apply Mulch: Spread it a good inch thick on the ground around your plants.

• Don't pile it up against their stems: leave about 6 inches clear.
• Don't make the mulch layer too high - you don't want the roots to grow up into it. 1-2 inches is plenty.