Organic Vegetable Garden Mulch

Using mulch in your organic vegetable garden, or any garden, will provide several benefits. The three primary benefits are it helps conserve water, suppresses weeds and adds organic matter to the soil, all with only a few minutes time spent.

Organic Vegetable Garden Mulch

1. Helps conserve water. The reason mulch helps conserve water is that it shades the soil.

By adding mulch the soil will stay cooler, losing less water to evaporation and staying more evenly moist, which is good for the plants.

2. Suppresses weeds. A good layer of mulch will keep weeds from growing.

Weed seeds need light to germinate, under mulch they will stay shaded, any that happen to land on top of the mulch and germinate will quickly dry out in the sun

A layer of cardboard or several layers of newspaper under a kind of loose mulch, such as grass clippings or straw, will provide a nearly impenetrable barrier for weeds that try to grow through it. A hole will have to be cut in the cardboard or newspaper and your desirable plants planted in the soil, loose mulch can be pulled back around their stems.

3. Adds organic matter to the soil. Mulches will break down over time adding organic matter and valuable nutrients to the soil in your garden bed, black plastic is obviously an exception, it will just turn brittle and break into small pieces after a couple years.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of using organic vegetable garden mulches can be summed up by saying “it makes it easier to grow a garden.” Most things that make my gardening easier I like.

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