The Cheapest Mulch Strategy Actually Works Better

How much money do you spend on mulch every year to protect and feed your soil? What if I told you that there were seven easy ways to use less mulch on your vegetable garden beds and save money on bags of mulch? Anyone can do it and I'm going to show you how. Hi I'm Dr Wendy Seabrook from Learning from Nature. I'll show you the seven techniques but first we need to understand why these techniques are even more beneficial than spreading mulch. As you know mulch provides a protective cover on our soil and increases the amount of organic matter in our soil. But what many people miss is that by growing more plants and managing them in our garden beds works better than spreading bags of mulch. Plants naturally produce mulch and we can create extra mulch by chopping and dropping the leaves and stems and dropping them onto the soil. But more importantly plants improve the food supply to our microbes and the other life in our soil and this is important because they are the ones that maintain our soil structure. Soil organisms recycle the nutrients in our mulch and naturally supply them to our crops and plants improve the food supply enabling our soil organisms to do these two jobs because they supply organic materials from roots and root exudates in addition to the mulch that they create. Consequently our crops get better self-service catering from our soil ecosystem and I explain more in this video. The second reason why living plants are better than mulch or traditional mulch is that mulch isn't as effective as we've been led to believe at increasing organic matter in our soil. The leaves and other organic material that lie on the soil get quickly eaten by our soil organisms and they breathe out the carbon in the carbon dioxide just like we do and since organic matter is 50% carbon you can see now why our mulch quickly disappears. Research shows that to increase the amount of organic matter in our soil we need materials organic materials from roots and root exudates and root tissues and I explain more in this video. So since we can use plants to reduce the amount of mulch we buy here are the seven easy ways we can grow more of them in our vegetable garden beds. We can use our crops but also companion plants and other ecological support plants. So firstly we can grow fast-growing biomass producing plants like corn and pumpkins so these will grow bigger leaves quickly so that we have more plant material to chop and drop onto our soil chop and drop onto our soil and and there it will rot and feed our soil organisms. You know we can even grow them in our path on one side of our garden beds so instead of mowing and mulching those paths grow lots of biomass fast-growing biomass accumulating plants and you that leaves you room to get access to your garden beds from the other side and some people grow alleys what we call alleys in strips in the areas where they're growing vegetables to grow even more biomass accumulating plants. The second thing we can do is simply grow plants closer together. We can often leave less space in between plants without worrying about competition. Competition for nutrients isn't as much of a problem as we've been led to believe and I explain more in this video. We can grow plants with different leaf shapes and different growth forms and that helps us to grow more plants closer together because by using those different growth forms we actually reduce the competition for light and space. Thirdly we can grow crops in sequence like Dave is doing in his garden. So this garden pretty much goes all year around so do the communal one so whenever you see something's dying or something is finished their season you just choose the seeds that are suitable for the season and you inter-plant them. Fourthly we can grow living mulch which is a permanent cover of plants under our crops. To grow living mulch we use perennial and self-seeding plants as you can see in this video here. Another way we can grow more plants is by growing green manure and cover crops and that way we can maintain a cover of actively growing plants and avoid having bare soil when we're not growing crops. A little bit more dynamically we can grow plants in a trellis above our garden beds or even grow open canopy trees above our veggie beds and that way that they're dropping all of those leaves or we can cut and drop the leaves to add more mulch to feed our soil organisms. So next time you're working hard spreading mulch think instead about how you can use these techniques to grow more plants in your vegetable garden beds.