Decomposing an Ode to the Earth in Fall
In late fall with winter fast approaching, gardening takes on an elegiac air. When fog mantels the coast and Santa Anas snake through our canyons, I venture outdoors and try to see in the end of things a beginning. Of the chores that I perform, none is as simple or as salutary as spreading mulch.
Let garden books devote pages to plants. Scant space, in my opinion, is devoted to the restorative power of leaf mold, duff and wood chips raked about the yard. Sallow gardens under their spell proliferate by spring. Soil, leeched of its nutrients--swept clean by mow-and-blow gardeners dutifully answering a homeowner’s call for tidiness--soon breathes.
Never underestimate the power of a decaying leaf. It’s a simple aphorism emblazoned above my rakes and clippers. I learned it a year ago when I happened upon a variety of mulch that made all others seem like mere fodder.
Thomas Landscaping & Soil Builders is in one of those L.A. neighborhoods--where El Monte abuts a sliver of Arcadia--that seems to have been untouched by time. Roosters break the quiet of the morning. Homing pigeons circle in a swoosh of flapping wings. Not far away are the gravel pits and drainage basins of Irwindale and the incessant rush of freeway traffic.
I didn’t know what to expect on my first visit. I was, after all, a newcomer to the world of mulch. The street address is a small postwar home with a waist-high chain-link fence, and when I knocked on the screen door, an old man came into the light.
“I’m here for Terry,” I said, as if this were some illicit transaction. The old man made his way outside and started to wobble. I thought he might fall and offered to help, but he shook me off and settled against the door frame.
I’d spoken with Terry--Terry Smith, the owner of the company since 1977--earlier in the week. He sounded straight up when he gave me this address, but I now wondered if I had gotten it wrong.
“Terry will be back in a few minutes,” the old man eventually said and pointed to a dirt road, 100 feet away, where I should wait for him. I thanked him, and as I walked back to my truck, puzzled by this exchange, I noticed across the street the branches of a pomegranate tree sagging under its fruit. I took this as a good sign, and it was. Smith showed up, and the mulch was better than I had expected.
Twelve months later, I’m back for more, comfortably winding my way past the small home with the waist-high chain-link fence to the dirt road and the work yard in all its beautiful disarray. A semitrailer, skip loader, open sheds and shipping pallets sit to one side; a log splitter, wood chipper, firewood and tree stumps to another and, in the back, there is the mulch pit.
Nothing is less pretentious than these 10-foot-high mounds of tree scraps. They’re not much to look at, but close your eyes and the smell is surprisingly lovely, as if someone had managed to distill a forest in a jar. Pick some of it up, and you’ll notice that that it’s warm to the touch. Burrow your hand in deep, and the tips of your fingers start to burn.
The word mulch has come to describe any material used to enrich or insulate the soil. Trace it back four centuries, and mulch means half-rotten straw. Further still, and the noun becomes an adjective for mellow, soft or mild, as if one were describing the weather. I may be a little late this year--I like to spread mulch in the cusp between summer and fall (though some gardeners mulch two or three times a year)--but what counts is to have it down before the rains, the long slow seasonal saturation (if we’re lucky) of January and February, that can drive its nutrients into the soil.
“You don’t want that stuff.” Smith catches me testing the product. “It’s too green and too hot,” he says. I pull out my hand and brush it clean.
A generous, garrulous man, Smith talks about mulch the way vintners discuss grapes. He directs me to a much cooler mound. At 59, he walks with a conspicuous limp, the result of a back injury almost 40 years ago, but when he climbs atop the skip loader, he is suddenly at one with the towering machine. He burrows the plow blade deep into the pile of the mulch, lifting and dropping it into the bed of my truck, 3 cubic yards in one fell swoop, two times over. I’m not one to take my obsessions lightly.
Nor are his other customers: Some come in pickup trucks and sedans filled with empty trash cans, others in Lexuses and Cadillacs with double-lined Glad bags and a few more, like myself, in rented stake-bed trucks. The best mulch for gardening--according to Frank McDonough, a botanical information consultant with the Los Angeles County Arboretum--is compost. I had called McDonough a few days earlier.
“Composts can be a mulch, but not all mulches are compost.” Mulches don’t even have to be organic. Gypsum, weed cloth, stones, pea gravel, even crumbled safety glass can be used as mulches and are fine if what you want is weed control and water conservation.
But it’s the combustion of organic materials, air and water, that gives real mulch its punch. The heat, McDonough explained, is generated by the aerobic microorganisms, the mesophyllic bacteria and thermophilic fungi that feed on the carbohydrates in the wood and produce ammonia. In the right combination, they can set up a chain reaction that will drive temperatures up to 180 degrees at the core.
Which explains the heat and the steam now rising from the cavity created by the skip loader. Smith’s secret is in the grinding. Most mulch today comes from wood chippers, those uncommonly loud machines that can render a tree into a mishmash of sticks and barks and leaves in seconds.
Smith’s mulch is different. Hold it in your hand, and you’ll see: No piece--either leaf or wood fiber--is larger than three-quarters of an inch. It’s a trick made possible by the most ungainly piece of rusty farm equipment: the Farmhard Tub Grinder. Trees--limbs, leaves and trunks--go into a 7-foot-wide maw at the top that slowly rotates, forcing everything to the bottom, where a series of metal bars grind them into three-fourths-inch-size pieces, before they fall through a mesh screen onto a conveyor belt that carries them to the mulch pile.
Smith’s especially proud of the grinder. There are not many like it making mulch in Southern California this way, a little fact that puts him--in his estimation--well ahead of the competition. He purchased it in 1982. He had at the time a tree trimming business (still does) and was tired of seeing half of his profits go to the city dump.
Now he recycles everything--with the exception of palm tree products (terrible for mulch, he says)--and has learned over time that the best way to start a batch of mulch is to begin with material that is still green. The moisture in the leaves and wood--in just the right amount--creates an ideal environment to get the mulch cooking like compost. He lets it age for six months, and then the mulch is ready to sell, at $12 a cubic yard.
I thank him, pay and promise to return next year. When I spread this concoction throughout the garden, I’m careful not to waste any of it. Hauling it into the backyard, one wheel barrel load after another, I wonder what my neighbors must think. I don’t have an elaborate garden. But never mind.
Who says a garden must be defined merely by its trees and shrubs?
