What Does Mulch Look Like?

Series Summary

Mulch is almost magic, or so it seems. Mulch is used by gardeners the world over to help soil retain heat in the cooler seasons, prevent weeds by blocking sunlight from reaching the soil, retain water in the area, provide nutrients as the mulch decays, repel insects and helps control erosion caused by rains. Mulch is quite the versatile and valuable material. But what is mulch, really? Mulch can be made from a broad range of natural or synthetic material, from wood chips to rubber, but is most commonly shredded or chipped organic material like wood or straw. In parts of Pennsylvania and Northern California, gardeners use the term "tanbark" to refer to mulch in general. In this free video series, a gardener and horticulturist explains how to use mulch. Learn what mulch looks like, the different uses of mulch and how to mulch a flower garden.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Stan DeFreitas, Mr. Green Thumb. We're at Willow Tree Nursery in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Mulch. Well, what is mulch? Mulch is almost any material that you can use to help conserve moisture and often if it's organic it's going to break down and help to feed the plant. Now, you can use something like we have here. This happens to be some cypress mulch that we're using as a material to help hold down weeds. It can help to conserve moisture. Remember when you put mulch over an area you can also help to hold the fertilizer in around the plants. So, mulch does a number of things; moisture, help hold fertilizer, and if it's organic it's going to break down into some food value. Mulch is often either going to be in shredded form or chipped form and that's the way it's usually developed being put through a chipper or a shredder and of course this mulch will be kind of long and stringy. Even when you get tires, they've been put through a process where they've been chopped up and often they've had some kind of dye added to them. If it's rocks of course obviously it's coming out of a bag. Of course the rocks and the tires don't really break down to give you anything as far as food value. So, I tend to be a preference for organic material and you can use husk, you can use cypress, you can use wood chips, pine nuggets, oak chips. There's all kinds of mulch that have been developed and used to help hold your plant in place. Do remember that if you're using organic mulch normally you don't want it up too far up around the base of the plant because you could hold moisture on a part of a plant that's not really adapted well to have that happen. You could increase some of your fungal problems. So, keep your mulch a couple of inches away from the base of the pant and hold it out evenly. Mulch will help to hold moisture, help hold fertilizer, and it's a good thing to recycle material. I'm Stan DeFreitas for AskMrGreenThumb.com."