Stop Using Mulch

Do not use wood mulch in your vegetable garden. I'm going to tell you why in this episode. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. My name is Nicole Johnsey Burke, and today we're going to talk about all the reasons why I don't think it's a good idea to put wood mulch in your vegetable garden. So this has caused quite a stir on the interwebs when I tell people that I don't use mulch and, or particularly that I don't use wood mulch in the vegetable garden. Because a lot of vegetable gardeners, they love them some mulch. I mean, they just. They love the mulch and I just don't. So let me break it down for you in today's episode. First off, I'm talking about a vegetable garden. So we're not talking about all gardens, although in general, I don't use mulch anywhere. And I'll tell you at the end why that is. But some people are like, I have to use mulch in my ornamental garden. Fine, fine, fine. But not in the vegetable garden. So here are the key reasons why I say this is a bad idea. And let me say, first of all, it's not that I've never tried it. I've tried it. I tried it in my own garden. This is my husband's main theory, that we should do wood mulch in our garden. Tried it in my garden, even in my first season with my clients with raised bed kitchen gardens, I tried it in theirs. So I have tried it, okay? I have tried it and I have found it lacking. So number one reason why I don't use mulch in the raised bed kitchen gardens with vegetable gardening is wood mulch is not done. That's the key. It's not done, it's not finished. It's on its way to decomposition, to fully returning back to the earth and becoming soil, but it is not there yet. It is in the process. And so in general, in my garden, I want things that are one growing, right? Like becoming, going from seed to plant to leaf to root to fruit, all that kind of stuff. I want plants that are growing in the process of growing. Don't really want them in the garden if they're in the process of dying, although that happens. And then I want everything else pretty much, like, so stagnant and in a very good place. I want everything else pretty much stationary. Now we know that soil is a living thing. That soil is always, you know, changing and nutrients and minerals are moving from soil into the plant, back out of the plant, that kind of thing. Water is going to be falling into the soil, going up into the plant, and then the plant will be. What do you call it? Letting off the water. There's a word for that, but it's doing that, transpiring. Is that right? All that's happening. Okay. Things are changing, but in general, I don't want to add to the change. Okay. I want nature to be doing its thing. I want that soil to be feeding my plants. But I don't want there to be a lot of change happening with my soil. I want the main change in my garden, and this is it. The main change in my garden should be happening with my plants, not with anything else. When you bring mulch into your garden, mulch is in the process of changing. You're catching it on its way out. All right? It's decomposing. It's turning into soil. It will eventually, if you let it sit there, you know, if it sits there long enough, it's going to go from a wood chip into dust. It's going to turn into soil, even, I guess you call it compost, right. It's going to break down into this texture that eventually will be soil, which is great. And I want that mulch to break down and turn into soil. I just don't want it to do it in my garden. So as wood decomposes, as wood goes from a wood chip into just fine soil particles, it is going to pull nitrogen from its surrounding area. That's just a natural. I'm not a chemist. My husband is. From what I understand, you know, this is my baseline. Okay. Of chemical understanding. But when the wood texture, the wood structure is decomposing, whatever it's touching, it's pulling up nitrogen to help it do just that. So as it's breaking apart its compounds and destructurizing itself to turn into dust, it's pulling nitrogen to speed up that process. Well, as it's doing that, guess what? Your plants, the ones that we want to be changing and growing and becoming something new, they need. What's the main mineral they need, the main nutrient they need as they start to grow? Leaves and roots and fruit? Nitrogen. So when you plant out all your vegetable plants and then you sprinkle them around with wood mulch, you've now got two things in your garden that are changing. One's getting. One's coming into life, one's returning to the earth, and they both need nitrogen to do it. So you've now created this tug of war between your plants, which you want to grow, and your wood chips, which you want to turn into compost, but they're now both needing nitrogen. They're needing the exact same resource from your soil at the exact same time. This is just not a good idea to me. Why would I want to introduce a new thing, a new material into my garden that's going to need the exact same nutrients that my favorite precious, amazing plants need? No, it all goes to my plants, thank you. The wood mulch can break down elsewhere. And when it's completely broken down and is compost, then it can come into my garden, but not before. So that is, overall, I'm going to give you a couple of other reasons, but in general, that is the overall thing. Now, your soil people, your soil scientists and your people who are really into the breakdown and the minerals and the this and the fungi and all that, they're going to say, oh, but as those break down, then it creates new. It brings in new nutrients and new. All kinds of new things that feed your soil. Yes, I agree. But let it decompose outside of my garden because that, even that little small need of nitrogen that happens when that mulch is decomposing, it interrupts the process. And I've seen it again and again and again. I'll go on a garden consult. I've seen it in my own garden. When I get a soil that has too many wood chips in it, I see the struggle of those wood chips sitting on the top of the soil, trying to break themselves down, pulling up nitrogen at the same time as my plants struggling to get the nitrogen they need to grow to the next level. And so that's the number one reason why I don't put wood chips. I don't put wood chip mulch in my garden. Number two, reason number two is if we need another one, that one is just done. But reason number two is the pest. So, so many of the pests that are going to prey on your vegetable plants, they love the tenderness of those vegetable plants. They are hiders. They are by nature, they have learned to camouflage themselves, to make themselves invisible to the naked eye and to find places where they can hide. And they can. In that hiding place, they can nest, they can multiply, they can lay their eggs. And they know that they're tiny, okay? They know that they have a lot of predators. They know the birds are coming for them. They know that larger insects are coming for them. And so they've adapted, right? They've evolved to hide. Well, guess where they love to hide Underneath wood mulch. They love hiding There, all those little pieces of wood you're putting in your vegetable garden, you're essentially saying to all the caterpillars and the moths and the slugs and the snails, you're saying, like, come on in, I just made you a house. I just made you the best place to hide from all the birds. And I found that again and again. When I go to a garden that's got this nice thick layer of wood mulch around their vegetable plants, I pull it up and there are loads of roly polys and slugs and snails and all kinds of things, creepy, crawly things hiding right under that wood mulch. And that's the number two reason why I would not put wood mulch into a vegetable garden. Because you're essentially creating a habitat for the pests, the very exact insects. You're going to want to stay off your plants. You've just created a habitat for them by putting that wood mulch in. So that is reason number two. Reason number one, it needs the exact same nutrients that your plants need to grow. Reason number two, it is creating a hiding place, a habitat for all those pests that are going to come and eat your plants. So you're not just fighting for the nutrients. You're now, basically, you've brought the enemy inside. Okay, You've crossed enemy lines here and let the enemy get the secret passage into your base camp here. When you create, when you add wood mulch, the third reason, and maybe probably the best, even though the first two are pretty convincing, and that is because the main reason I don't use wood mulch is because that's planting space, duh, you know, that's room to put plants in. So a lot of people, the typical way to plant a vegetable garden is one plant, three feet, another plant, three feet, another plant. And if you look at most garden gardeners online, most, you know, vegetable gardening books, some are different, but most, they've got a bed of cabbages and it's got 12 cabbages in it. And then they've got a bed of peppers and it's got 15 peppers in it. And that's it. It's just the pepper bed and the cabbage bed and the tomato bed. And so of course they're going to put in those tomatoes. And then they're like, oh, I got a mulch, right? Because there's all this empty soil. And they'll comment on all my posts and say, oh, there's no way my garden would survive, you know, if I didn't mulch it, because it would just Dry out. And the assumption is that the soil is just bare. Well, for my gardens, if you look on my gardens online, in the gardenary style, is that we plant every square inch of a raised bed. That is prime real estate, my friends. That is like beachfront property. You've spent a ton of money to set up your raised beds to get the soil just right to have the irrigation. Why on earth would you give any inch, even a square inch of room to a piece of wood mulch? That's not going to provide you any food, any beauty. It's not going to feed anything. It's just going to sit there and decay and turn into soil. Why would you give prime real estate on the beach to a piece of wood mulch? No. So what I do instead is I break my plants up into categories. Large, small, and medium. And when I plant, say, a bed of tomatoes, I'm going to come right back underneath those plants. And I'm also going to plant peppers and basil and bush beans and marigolds and arugula and some herbs like oregano and rosemary and thyme. I'm going to fill in that entire bed with medium and small plants in between the large plants. So I'm not suggesting that the soil needs to be bare. It doesn't. That's going to be terrible. I'm not saying leave the soil bare. I'm saying instead of putting mulch there, put some plants there. In fact, our company's practice is that six weeks after the garden is planted, we should come back and shouldn't be able to see any bare soil. In other words, there shouldn't be any room for mulch. There should be plants everywhere instead of mulch. And some people call this the idea of living mulch. I don't like to say that because mulch has an idea of, like, it's not useful, Right? So I don't even need the word mulch. Mulch is out. No mulch. Okay? No mulch. We just need plants. And so instead of thinking, oh, no, I can't have bare soil, which is true, instead of solving that problem with a bunch of wood chips, let's solve that problem with my method of intensive planting. Now, if you want to learn this method, this is in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. I teach it in chapter five, where I teach you how. No, number six, where I teach you how to intensively plant. And this is a method I teach all over the Internet about packing in the plants. And when you pack in the plants this way, there isn't, you know, you won't even think about having mulch, because your mulch is literally going to cover up the seeds and the plants that you have in the garden and will keep them from growing. So that is the deal, you guys. Those are the three reasons why I don't use mulch in the garden. Number one, it is creating a tug of war. Excuse me. Number one, it's creating a tug of war between your plants that you want to live and the soil that is decomposing. So you are now creating a quick run, a big competition between who's going to get the nitrogen, Is it going to be the plants that you want to grow or the wood chips that are trying to decompose? Number two reason not to use wood chips is it's a hiding place for pests and disease. So many things are looking for a cold, cool, dark, moist place to put up a hotel and to have some kids and to multiply and run the place. And when you set up a wood mulch situation in your garden, you are literally putting out the welcome mat and saying, come on in. And then the final reason is because this is prime real estate. Your kitchen garden, your vegetable garden, is such important real estate, it's cost you so much time and money to create this space, so why give it over to something as useless as mulch? Put plants there instead. So you're going to keep it watered really well for the first few weeks as those come in, and then within six weeks, you shouldn't see any soil, and all that soil is protected by plants instead of by mulch. Now, finally, I want to end up just by giving you one tip. And if you plant this way, if you go at the garden the way I do, then you do have to take the intensive planting pledge. So this is in my book in chapter six. But essentially, you have to promise that you're going to prune and harvest and enjoy and use your plants. So this works. It keeps pests at bay. It means you don't have to water your garden a lot, but it only works if you prune and harvest, because you're going to have so right, if you just had that one bed of tomatoes or one bed of peppers, then you can wait all day long to go take care of those plants, because there's just like eight of them. But if you plant my way, you're going to have loads of plants all over the garden. And so you've got to come and prune and use and harvest and enjoy from those plants in order to make sure that every plant has the right amount of space it needs to grow to its fullest potential. I'm sure you're coming at me already from the desert, from the really hot places of the world like Houston and Florida and Arizona. I've heard them all. I've heard all the excuses, okay, but listen to me. I have done this kind of planting in the very hot summers in Houston, Texas. I have done these in the very cold places in Chicago times. I didn't have irrigation systems in my garden and I do this in Nashville where my garden we hit over 100 this last summer. I had no irrigation in my beds. So this system works. If you work the system, if you plant intensively, if you prune and harvest often, you will not need wood mulch in your garden and you will save yourself from the nitrogen fight, from the pests that are going to hide and live inside that mulch. And you're going to get a much more productive, beautiful, delicious, amazing, full garden when you plant my way. So what do you think? Are you up for it? Tell me in the comments. Come and tell us online what you think of the no mulch method for the garden. I can't wait to hear your opinion on my opinion that mulch just doesn't belong in a kitchen garden. Good luck in the garden. I will see you next time. If you want to grab our resources, head to gardenary.com calendar We've got a calendar to show you what to plant and when. All you have to do is put in two dates. We do the rest of the work for you. This calendar is going to help you to plan out your whole year and make sure you know what plants need to go in between all those plants so that you don't have to use any mulch item either. I'll see you next time on the Grow youw Self podcast. Bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary.com podcast.