How to Use Living Mulch

Gardeners use mulch for many different reasons. Mulch helps regulate temperature keeping the garden plants at a constant temperature. Mulch also holds moisture and helps keep plants from drying out. Different types of mulch are available for gardeners. Here's how to use living mulch, an often forgotten type of mulch.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Buy living mulch. Living mulch grows among actual crops. It consists of fast growing ground cover plants such as alfalfa, clover and rye grass. It adds nutrients such as nitrogen that may leach or leak out of normal soils with excessive watering and planting. Purchase living mulch at home and garden stores, Internet garden retailers or feed and tractor supply stores. Look for seeds marked as ground cover. These are the seeds to use for living mulch.

2. Sow living mulch at the appropriate time. Most cover crops are broken into two main categories, spring sown and fall sown. Use spring sown cover crops to help mulch beds used for summer crops such as squash, sunflowers and cucumbers. Sow fall ground covers to help add nutrients over the winter. Let them continue to grow to add a barrier to weeds and help prevent soil erosion.

3. Keep living mulch well watered and feed it with an all-purpose fertilizer. Treat living mulch the same as you would treat any other garden crop.

4. Trim the living mulch if necessary. Keep the ground cover below the other main crops to prevent tangling and keep the ground cover from competing with the main crop.

5. Till in the living mulch the next year or when the mulch's life cycle ends. Plant new living mulch each year to gain the full benefits of using a living mulch.