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ROSE CARE FOR APRIL
by Barbara Picarelli, Consulting Rosarian
by Barbara Picarelli, Consulting Rosarian
We’ve covered planting, potting, pruning, and fertilizing. So let’s focus on mulching those plants we so carefully planted. Mulching has a two fold benefit. It helps the soil retain moisture, and in turn saves on the water bill. Pretty neat, huh? Mulching insulates roots from the heat, (as much as 10 to 15 degrees) and also cold, and helps to cut down on weeding. So while it takes a little time to put down, it does have a lot of good reasons to do it.
Mulch can be easily and simply classified as any material that protects the soil and allows both water and air to pass through. There are both organic and non organic mulches. Organic includes those materials that are derived from plants. These will add nutrients over time as they decompose. Things such as compost (mushroom), aged manure, leaves, pine needles, cocoa bean hulls (avoid with dogs), rice hulls, and lawn clippings (hopefully pesticide free). Non organic is such materials as gravel, granite or stones. Gravel and stone of course weigh a lot more, do not add nutrients, and require more labor to place. Using hardware cloth under gravel or stone is also a good idea in case you need to remove any of it, less sifting of the soil to remove the agent. Since they are much heavier, these two mulches are more useful in walkways or near areas where soil erosion might occur.
Apply your mulch after you’ve weeded the area, put down your fertilizer and you’re done! Usually early spring and it’s done normally only once a year, unless you’re moving plants around at a later date. Wheelbarrow and shovel it onto your site. I buy it in bags, much easier to manipulate.
How much you’ll need is determined by the area you need to cover. Normally one puts it down after fertilizing and weeding the site, then put down the mulch of choice. To calculate an area multiply, the width by length of bed, which will give you the square feet. Divide the number of inches wanted (3) by 12. Multiply the number of square feet by the number of inches to get the number of cubic feet. Or do it the easy way, a two cubic foot bag should cover about 8 square feet at 3 inches deep. A cubic yard will cover 108 square feet 3 inches deep. It should be kept a few inches away from plant trunks to avoid the possibility of rotting. I buy my mulch from a large “container” store and put smaller redwood bark down first about 2 inches then a layer of large bark. I find the larger bark doesn’t get blown away and the two together keeps the soil nice and moist during the heat of summer.
Mulch can be left in place indefinitely, scrape it to the side if you need to fertilize or to plant. I mulch all my container plants as well, both for esthetics and to retain soil moisture. Eventually you’ll see the depth of the mulch slowly decreasing as it decomposes and add nutrients (especially trace minerals) to the soil. One more benefit to mulch!
As an added fact, an e-mail was going around that trees from the Katrina area was being composted into mulch and sold at both Home Depot and Lowes. The fact is that these trees were already diseased and were already quarantined by the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, and no diseased mulch is being shipped.
Information supplied by Consulting Rosarian Manual, and Sunset Magazine, April edition.
A YEAR OF ROSE CARE:
January
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Last Modified: 4/6/06