The Importance of Mulch

 As everyone in Horticultural Plants has seen with our vegetable plots, mulch can play a large part in maintaining a garden. Our vegie plots were getting taken over by weeds that were growing so fast that every week we had to maintain it. The importance of mulch to depress weeds and insulate plants can play a major part in a plants ability to grow in the garden.

Mulch can be made up of organic matter (such as grass cuttings), or artificial (such as plastic), yet the main purpose is the same, to insulate plants and surpress weeds.

At home, our front garden is fairly new being only two years old, yet we have only applied mulch once at the start. We used two different types of mulch, one type was darker, more decomposed mulch that we got delivered from the tip, the other type was tree shreddings from out next door neighbour.
The mulch from the tip turned out to be effective, yet after a while began to turn into fertile top soil because it was more decomposed, and weeds started growing on top of it. While the other mulch was made up of more wood chips with leaf matter mixed in, and had taken much longer to break down and has been extreamly successful mulch with not many weeds being able to grow at all.

Even though almost all mulch is benificial to plant growth, there are also things that need to consider, such as the amount of organic matter that will decompose, the main objective of the mulch, and the type of nutrients the mulch will provide to the soil.

One subject i would like to research, would be the negatives behind mulch, and types of mulch that shouldnt get put on certain plants, and is artificial mulch more benificial. Hopfully one day i can find out.

Advanced trees Vs Amature trees

For our Information Literacy group assignment, our group has decided to chose the subject 'Are Advanced Trees Worth it?'. It is a good topic considering that many councils and urban landscapers are using more advanced trees to create more of an instant garden or landscape. Even though advanced trees look great, and do create this instant garden, not many amateur gardeners would be able to afford advanced trees because they are so expensive.
At work at the advanced trees nursery, i asked one of the guys the same question, 'Are advanced trees worth it?' and what benefits that buying advanced trees are. The topic is very subjective, because it depends largely on the quality of the plant, large or small to determine whether the plant is worth buying in the first place. For an advanced tree to be worth buying, it needs to be well maintained, with good roots, good caliper, good structure and needs to be in good proportion. The plant needs to be able to grow roots quick enough to anchor itself into where it is planted, to be able to survive the elements such as wind. For advanced trees to be able to do this, they must not be affected by root circling or j roots, because these will essentially cause the roots to strangle the plant, and the plant will be unable to grow roots outwards to support itself, instead the roots will continue to grow around in circles as it had been in the pot. If the advanced tree has been managed correctly, it will be able to grow roots quickly and be able to begin to grow in its new environment very quickly.
Buying small trees there are financial benefits, yet the trees need to be managed correctly to be able to grow in shape and correctly. If young trees and left to grow randomly without pruning, they can quickly become 'leggy' and grow into strange shapes and can become lopsided which could cause the plant to drop branches, and not grow into a healthy plant and wont live up to its potential.
If you are knowledgeable and willing to maintain the small plants you buy, than small trees are well worth it because many species generally do grow quickly. If you want an instant garden with not much maintenance than high quality advanced trees are the way to go.

18th April, 2011- native weeds

During a recent lecture we discussed plants that have become weeds in the Australian environment, and that there are many native plants which have become weeds in certain areas. After this discussion, it made me more aware to look around my local landscapes and try and determine which weeds in the area are exotic, and which ones are native. In my front yard, we had planted two grasses called Pennisetum alopecuroides and they are really nice looking green grasses which grow  1.5m high and 1.5m wide, yet in the year that they have been growing, they have multiplied to about 20 separate plants in the front yard. Even though they’re a great, attractive plant to have in the garden, they have started to cause a little bit of problem, but they have been fairly easy to cull and keep under control, it can also be seem as an unwanted extra job. It also got me thinking while I was at work, (I work at a wholesale advanced tree nursery called Speciality Trees in Narre Warren East) there is a lot of weeding and weed maintenance needed to be done in the nursery, so I wondered whether there were any native weeds that they had trouble keeping under control. I asked one of the workers, and he said that there actually was a problem with some of the native plants that are planted around the nursery as being a weed and germinating in many of the plants pots. I’m not sure of the actual species, yet it was a type of she-oak and he showed me an area which hadn’t been weeded in a while, and surely enough there were plenty of she-oak seedlings which had started to grow in the pots of the trees. Being able to realise that not only exotic plants are seen as weeds has opened up my eyes to the diversity of trees, and the potential of plants becoming problems in certain areas. It also makes me think more about plant selection in certain areas, and the plant selection of different plants within the landscapes around my house, and the plant choices of the council.