Benefits of Grow Living Mulch

Mulch in Your Garden

If there is one word that every gardener can do less, it is weeding. Even those who happily spend every waking moment in the garden, prefer to pluck, mow, and water instead of weeding.

So, we mulch.

Every year we cover the soil and the base of the plants with mulch to prevent weeds and retain moisture. When it comes to the organic material you use to make mulch, you have plenty of options. You can easily get grass cuttings, dead leaves, pine cones, etc. in your own backyard. But whatever we use seems to end up breaking the back and breaking the knee. Instead of spreading dry materials like straw or commercially processed bark in your garden, you should consider growing live mulch this year. Using another plant as a mulch (or cover crop) is more than just keeping weeds in the bay.

Benefits of Growing Mulch

1. Weed control

Obviously, one of the key benefits of any mulch, including living mulch, is weed control. When you are already growing tomatoes, peppers, and beans, you can stand a chance of weeds, add low-growing living mulch.

2. Moisture retention

A living mulch helps keep the soil moist like any other mulch, with one big exception. When you put down grass clippings, bark, or other dry organic matter, it can rot in high humidity and lead to disease. A living mulch is moist when it allows adequate ventilation between the soil and the plants. You are less likely to get into trouble especially with mulch living during the rainy season.

3. Prevent soil erosion

Again, mulch, in general, helps prevent soil erosion, but living mulch is the best way to keep the soil. With traditional mulch, you simply cover the soil, but when you grow a crop as mulch, there is a root system under the soil that keeps everything active. This is the best option so far.

4. Increase beneficial microorganisms in the soil

Also talking about the root system under the soil, a living mulch allows the growth of highly beneficial microorganisms and fungi, also known as mycorrhizae. Soil health is important for growing healthy crops.

What happens below your feet is more important to vegetables growing above the ground than you think. Like intestinal biology, which has received much attention in recent years, we are learning how important soil microbes are for plant health. By cultivating a living mulch, you create the root structure for that biology.

5. Creates humus to improve topsoil

Did you know that in the last 150 years we have lost more than half of the world's total soil? (World Wildlife Organization) This is a problem that is emerging very quickly in the commercial farming industry and will have a major impact on our ability to feed the people of the world in the years to come.

At home, we can help our own topsoil by growing living mulch and green manure, which actively builds up the humus and replace the topsoil that has been lost over time. Instead of pulling everything off the ground at the end of the season, growing a living mulch allows you to ‘cut it out at the end of the year. When you add nutrients back into the soil next year, you allow it to break down without interfering with the vital microbes below.

6. Attract pollinators and beneficial insects

Choosing to use live mulch also has the benefit of attracting pollinating and beneficial pests to your garden. As the number of pollinators decreased, many home gardeners had to deal with low yields due to pollination problems. When I was a kid, we never even thought of pollinating any of our vegetables by hand. These days you will be hard-pressed to find a gardening website and there is not even an article showing you how to do it. Growing a living mulch, you basically grow a pollinating buffet that you can eat. With it, you will attract an army of insects that love to eat your plants.

7. Chop the manure

To improve soil quality at the end of the season, almost all crops grown as living mulch can be cut where they are (chopping). I can leave). You can leave the roots in place and break the cut plant in the winter.

8. Living mulch does not hurt

Forget about making a special trip to the landscape to lay a yard or two of mulch. No more getting on your knees to throw handfuls of grass clippings around your plants. No, not with live mulch.

Growing a living mulch is as easy as sprinkling a seed packet around the areas where your mulch wants to be. That's all.