GARDENING : Benefits Are Mulch Ado About Something

Mulching is blanketing bare soil with some sort of covering. Any material laid on top of the soil prevents evaporation of water, leaving more for the plants, and smothers weeds, which rob plants of water, nutrients and light.

Mulching also has other benefits. Mulching keeps a soil cool in summer, and the roots of many plants enjoy a cool environment. Mulching softens the impact of driving rain so that soil is not spattered onto produce such as strawberries and tomatoes or carried away in rivulets.

Organic mulches such as straw and pine needles add nutrients and humus to soil as they decompose, a benefit that necessitates periodic renewal of these mulches.

Materials for mulch are outside your back door, down the street and at local garden centers and hardware stores. Your lawn can supply your garden with grass clippings and leaves, the latter saved in a pile in an out-of-the-way corner.

Supplement this with bags of grass clippings and leaves that your non-gardening neighbors may leave at the ends of their driveways. (However, watch out for clippings from lawns treated with herbicides, to which tomatoes and potatoes are especially sensitive.)

Other “garbage” suitable for mulch is newspapers, spread on the ground a few pages thick. Top the newspapers with a thin layer of wood chips, stones or anything else to keep the pages in place and out of sight. Discarded carpets or carpet pads are a long-lasting mulch.

You can also buy mulches. Straw is cheap and one of the best mulches. Somewhat more expensive are peat moss and pine bark. Cocoa bean hulls, a byproduct of chocolate manufacture, are a mulch whose aroma will make your mouth water, at least for a while.

Black plastic sheeting is a “high-tech” mulch. The drawback of plastic is that it is an eyesore, and it does not mulch the soil with humus. The main advantage of black plastic mulch is that it warms the soil, which is needed in northern gardens to ripen a good crop of muskmelons, peppers and other heat-loving vegetables.

The ultimate mulch is compost. Such a mulch will, essentially, weed, feed and water your garden.

Plants that benefit the most from mulch are those that are most succulent, such as cucumbers, tomatoes, beans and cabbages. If mulch is in short supply, use it on carrots, parsnips and beets last.

A few plants do not like mulch. Onions, for example, like the sun beating down on their exposed shoulders as they ripen in late summer.