Benjamin Vogt from Prairie Up / monarch gardens has some good insight on installing native landscapes. More and more I’m starting to shift my thinking to green mulch > wood mulch and I think this article sums it up well.
I’m guessing other people on this sub have run into this issue as well. It’s really easy to wipe out a bunch of grass through sheet mulching, but if you don’t keep on top of it and install a lot of new plants quickly, you can end up with a lot of weeds taking over. And ultimately it’s the desirable plants which help keep the area free of weeds and looking nice.
by CharlesV_
3 Comments
I use wood chips as a stopgap until things can fill in, especially my ground covers. Aside from concrete, not much is going to stop undesirable plants from growing.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so I plant densely then remove as it gets overcrowded.
Mulch was never intended to be The ground cover. Somewhere along the line the pretty pictures on the bags got to be how folks thought it was to be used so horrible beds of colored uniform mulch with dots of inappropriate shrubs was thought to be a nice planting bed. That’s just the after picture, not the final picture.
Folks still think mulch needs to be replaced. Maybe if plants are slow growing but plants should be creating their own ideal duff.
Ben’s a haughty cunt and intentionally limits his opinion to the plains without much disclaimer. When pointed out that a thick wood or leaf derived organic layer is pretty common for a lot of places east of the mississippi, he always goes, “well of course my lengthy opining is in regards to the central plains, duh.” Wood mulch is exactly as helpful as most people think but most DIYers bite off more area than they can chew in a season or two. Using less or more mulch doesn’t help that.