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.