Mulch for a sustainable landscape is any material that will naturally decompose and help hold moisture, reduce erosion, smother weeds, and nourish your soil. You can’t have enough organic material on your property to use as mulches. You can save money and create all sorts of functional benefits if you don’t throw away or burn mulch materials, or let the city haul it off. You just need to know what kinds of low cost organic materials are available where you live.
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Twigs, branches, grass clippings, leaves, corn stalks, cattails, untreated lumber, newspapers, magazines, paper towels, deer hides, your old blue jeans or cotton shirts, bark, sawdust, pine needles, dead weeds, cardboard, wool or jute rugs, Zebra Mussel shells, feathers, hair, shredded office paper, junk mail, old books, catalogs, straw and hay are all mulching material. In many suburban areas there is plenty of free mulch during fall and spring clean up days. You don’t have to drive far to get it, and you may even get people to bring the mulch to you.
If you feel a compost pile is too much work, our suggestion is to use the compost material as mulch. Place it where you want it and let it naturally decompose. This is a great way to start raised beds. Nature doesn’t compost; it decomposes. So, for instance, you can take branches and place them on the ground and layer other organic material over the branches to hasten decomposition.
When we reduce existing lawn areas we leave the sod in place and kill if off by smothering it with layers of paper or dense mulches. There’s no need to go through all of the work to remove sod and haul it off somewhere when the sod decomposes under the mulch and leaves an additional rich mulch layer of its own. |
