Viewing post #710721 by RoseBlush1

Toni ...

@KentPfeiffer wrote this about mulch in a thread where I was asking about mulching for drought:

KentPfeiffer said:It varies depending on a number of factors. But, in terms of retaining moisture, adding mulch pretty quickly results in diminishing returns. In other words, four inches of mulch is typically only slightly better at preventing moisture loss than two inches, for example. On the other hand, there's a nearly linear relationship between how deep mulch is and how much moisture (from rain or overhead watering) is prevented from reaching the soil surface at all , especially if the water comes in relatively small amounts at any given time. It's easily possible to make your soil drier by adding too much mulch. That's why you commonly see recommendations to limit mulch to a depth of two inches or so. Under "typical" conditions, that's deep enough to limit moisture loss to evaporation, but not so deep that it interferes with infiltration. The challenge is figuring out which variables you have that are not "typical", and what you need to do to adjust for them.

http://garden.org/thread/reply...

It really made me re-think how I mulched in my garden both for the drought and for winter.

I am just passing along a post that I found really interesting because I had never looked at the task of mulching in the way he described in his post.

Smiles,
Lyn