Mulching in some ways could be considered the opposite of weeding. Learn the best way to perform them both.
When gardening, you can expect only one thing for sure, and that is weeds are going to grow. These are the only constant a gardener will be familiar with.
Year after year the crops are going to differentiate and there will be slight oddities and irregularities, but the weeds will never stop coming, and that is just life. Weeds are going to grow all over your soil especially if you are mulching the ground, which you should be.
What is Mulch?
Mulching is when you take some sort of biodegradable organic matter and lay it over the soil. Any type of organic matter is going to have the key nutrients that plants need to survive: phosphorous, nitrogen and potassium.
However, they do more than just provide nutrients to the soil, they also protect the soil from the sun. Plants need sunlight, but, as it turns out, soil doesn’t need any sunlight at all.
Soil will remain soil for as long as it wants without sunlight; furthermore, sunlight is actually going to be harmful to the soil you have in your yard. Soil when broken apart becomes dust, and the only thing holding it together is liquid, in a process called cohesion.
If sunlight comes along and dries up the water, you are going to be left with dust instead of soil. This is exactly what happened back in the thirties with the catastrophic “dust bowl”.
People from Oklahoma are still recovering from that. Their landscape hasn’t been able to return to 100 percent and it has been 80 years!
Supposing they would have laid some red cedar bark over the top of their soil, then they would have kept the moistness in and the nutrients as well. As soon as you start throwing down mulch you are going to start seeing weeds pop up.
Recycle Weeds
The good thing about weeds is they are easily turned into organic matter. Take the weed, cut off the root and leave the rest of them laying on the soil to be absorbed by the soil with time.
If you need to remove weeds permanently, move away the mulch, pour in some vinegar, and then sprinkle in some kind of pre-emergent. The vinegar will help to kill whatever is left over from the weed, and the pre-emergent will protect from new seeds sprouting.
So be sure you know how to deal with weeds and mulch in your garden. It makes for a much better garden.
