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Phil: Hey Guys! It's Phil from smilinggardener.com and today we are talking about how to use
mulch and a quick reminder if you haven't signed up for the 15 Vital Lessons For Becoming
A Better Organic Gardener, you can do right on the homepage of smilinggardener.com.
So Haley, do you remember when we used to mulch at Aunt Tina and uncle George's?
Haley: I do. I think we have pictures somewhere of that.
Phil: Ah!
Haley: I don't know here.
Phil: I bet it's not digital though. I bet it's like a film picture.
Haley: Oh yeah. They are like – it's a film like 1986 or something like that.
Phil: So what did we do there?
Haley: Yeah. So I can remember just, you know, wrapping up use piles of leaves and jumping
in them and playing in them and all that stuff. But we would, Tina had us, like mow over them
until they were really finely shredded and then put them on her veggie garden. She had
a huge veggie garden. And I think we would turn them into the soil with like a pitch
fork or something like that. So – I can remember that quite well.
Phil: And then, it's kind of funny because we – when we became landscapers, we were
using like cedar mulch for many years and then when we got into organic gardening, we
were back to leaves mostly now, right?
Haley: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, how many yards of mulch did both of us shovel onto
people' gardens?
Phil: That was always fun though because that was lighter than like stones.
Haley: I loved mulching. It was like the most stratifying job but leaves is way funner,
super easy to do.
Phil: Okay. So what I am going to talk about really quickly and there is more detail on
the blog. What I want to talk about today is how to choose a mulch depending on if you
are growing more like trees and shrubs, maybe an orchard fruit trees or more like a vegetable
gardener annual plants.
So I guess I am just going to talk, right Haley?
Haley: I was good.
Phil: Okay. So okay. So just quickly, this is the main point I wanted to talk about today.
Trees and shrubs like more of a fungal dominated soil food web. They really want a lot more
fungi than bacteria. In order to get that, you want to definitely leave the mulch on
the surface of the soil and use some *** material, some wood chips, not bark mulch.
And definitely you want the wood chips from the same kind of tree.
So if you are planting fruit trees or other deciduous trees, you want deciduous mulch.
If you planting conifers you want more conifer mulch because if you use it with the wrong
one, it promotes the wrong fungi and there is other issues. So that's an important one.
Still leaves are always the most important part. But if you want to promote fungi, getting
a little *** material in there, especially early on when you are trying to establish
the fungal soil food web, that's what you want.
Over to your vegetable garden, that's when we definitely don't want *** material because
we want more of a balance between bacteria and fungi. So we want – that's really leaves
and maybe straw, maybe you consider turning it into the soil, just the top of the soil
because you don't want to disturb too much but just to promote more bacteria.
Or even, if you leave it on the surface. You just want a very think kind of, mulch of leaves
and straws and I think I carved it a little more eloquently in the blog but that's the
main thing I wanted to talk about today.
Hey, what have you been eating earlier?
Haley: Oh! I got these little fruits from the supermarket. Actually, I already posted
a picture of them on the Facebook and ask people about it. But they are like these little
berry that I never had before. You know, it's cool to be in the different country and like
try something that you have never saw before but like, they are so confusing. It's like
a citrusy melon and blue berry but it looks like a tomato. They are super interesting
though.
Phil: What do they call it? Do you know in English?
Haley: No. But I put it on – asked people on Facebook. So. I am sure somebody will know
what they are. I cannot translate it from Dutch. It doesn't look like anything that
I know.
Phil: So that's facebook.com/smilinggardner, right?
Haley: Yeah.
Phil: And do we had question for people today?
Haley: Yeah. We are going to ask people, like us, when you got into organic gardening, did
your practices change too, did you change the type of mulch you were using, or if you
have any other questions about types of mulch or how to use mulch, that would be a good
place to ask it down below the blog.
Phil: It sounds good to me.
Haley: Cool.
Phil: That's all for today.
Haley: Yeah. Bye for now.