Anyone who has known me long enough or has read anything I have written over the years, knows that it doesn’t take much to send me on a rampage about bad mulch or the improper application of mulch. Rest easy, because today I am going to talk about some beautiful mulch products, from a local company, that are wonderful in the natural, organic material they provide for soil and the crucial link they provide in the horse farm and landscape waste recycling ecosystems.
Matt and Mark Mitrano own and run Mad Mics Mulch, which is an extension of their excavation, waste and recycling businesses in Shirley, MA. About 10 years ago they started recycling horse bedding from local horse farms and combined it with shredded leaves to create garden gold in a mulch. As a funny note, there is no ‘Mad Scientist’ mixing mulch, as the name might imply, but it comes from combining the names of Matt’s children: Madelyn and Mick.
I met with Matt this week at the Mitrano’s operation in Shirley, to learn more and to see ‘how the sausage is made.’ In early January without snow, their team is hard at work stacking and flipping massive piles and creating mulch for the upcoming season.
First, let me talk a little about the incredible value that mulch provides to the garden. A good, natural mulch will:
- Retain moisture in the soil and minimize evaporation.
- Minimize weed growth and seed germination from the soil.
- Moderate quick temperature changes in summer and winter that can cause plant damage.
- Provide necessary organic material to improve soil and provide material for plant growth.
- Support good microbial activity in soil.
- Provide a nice finished look to the garden.
So often we are taking organic matter away from our gardens when we prune plants, cut back or dig up annuals and perennials, remove grass clippings, and remove leaves. Mulch helps to replace that important matter in the landscape, just like fallen leaves in the forest or cover crops on the farm.
In recent years more and more mulch on the market is created out of non-bark material that can include construction debris, wood pallets and other challenging wood material. It is then dyed red, brown and black. These mulches are not beneficial or additive to your gardens, in fact they take nutrients to help them break down, and they leave the chemical dyes in your soil year after year.
I can feel myself getting all worked up!
Much of the mulch that contractors are putting down is dyed, or enhanced, and most places that sell mulch don’t have as many natural offerings as they used to have. One of the great challenges of this mulch is that it can take years to break down and rob your soil of important nutrients intended for your plants.
At Mad Mics, the horse bedding they use contains some manure, pine shavings, straw, feed and anything else natural that may end up in a horse stall. It is combined with leaves and gets ground, screened, composted, piled multiple times, flipped and screened one last time until it is a beautiful medium-brown mulch. I have oversimplified the process, but as it gets stacked it composts at temperatures up to 160º, that will kill weed seeds and fully compost the manure. The leaves provide a great source of carbon that works with the nitrogen in the manure and urea from the horse urine to compost beautifully. I know that might sound unappealing, but the composting process eliminates any pathogens or challenges that the materials provide.
The end product is a lovely brown mulch that is light, but not so light as to blow away in the wind as plain leaf mold can do. It is clean and has a faint, sweet smell, which is a great indicator that it has been composted properly. Because it is light and free of large chunks of wood, it starts breaking down immediately to provide valuable organic material for your soil and plants. By the following season, there is no need to rake out the mulch like many of the wood based mulches, as it is mostly broken down. In shrub beds, where more mulch might be used when compared to a perennial bed or vegetable garden, a light raking in spring and an added layer will be good for the next season without that dreaded build-up of heavy, woody mulch that can really damage plants and trees by hogging nutrients, limiting oxygen in the root zone and depositing unwanted dyes.
An exciting development is that Matt and Mark have a new mulch product this season called Nature’s Blend, which is a darker and slightly heavier mulch made from triple ground tree stumps, leaves, and Heart and Soil® Wood Ash. This is a beautiful ‘black’ mulch, without the dye, that has a more traditional woody texture. I expect it won’t break down as quickly as the Mad Mics, but with the leaves and ash, it has the components to be of great benefit to your garden as it does decompose.
The team grinds and composts the wood in several stages before it gets combined with leaves and ash. The finished product is a slightly heavier, woodier mulch with a great dark, almost black, color. Because of the multiple grinds, the mulch doesn’t appear to have the larger and chunkier wood pieces you tend to get in a poor or dyed mulch, and with the wood going through a composting stage, it won’t rob nutrients from the soil to decompose.
An added side-benefit to using Mad Mics Mulch or Nature’s Blend is that it closes an important recycling loop of returning organic matter back to the soil, where in the past it may not have been used. Matt and Mark help horse farmers deal with their waste and they provide gardeners with a wonderful and nutrient-rich product in return. Everyone benefits in this process, including your plants. In the past, some farmers would use this waste to spread in their fields as a natural soil amendment, but that can be time-consuming and expensive with labor and equipment. Often times it would get piled up and in extreme cases pollute the surrounding soil and water table. With the Nature’s Blend mulch, they are recycling hard to manage stumps and using a recycled product in Wood Ash, that comes from New Hampshire. Both of their products get combined with a massive amount of leaves, or nature’s mulch. Both mulches are the result of conscious and proper recycling of natural materials so they can go back to work as the building blocks of new plants.
I wish I had a dump truck so I could deliver this mulch to all of you, but I do encourage you to go to the site and see where their products are carried or encourage your local nursery to carry it. If you use a contractor, encourage them to use this mulch. It may cost a little more if they have to travel further to purchase, but after using this product personally and in client’s gardens, I can say without doubt that there is nothing better that you can add to your gardens. For now it is only available in bulk, but they are considering a bagged product in the future. Year over year they are producing more mulch, and last year he sold out of his Mad Mics. He is expecting to increase his production total by about 20% this year, and I hope the demand continues to grow for this fantastic product.
As Spring rolls around you may start hearing me rage about tree volcanoes and bad mulching practices, but today I am celebrating a two great mulch products that accomplish many wonderful things in the garden and recycling ecosystems.
Demand good mulch and say no to dye!
Please let me know if you have used this mulch before and your opinion.
Barking Dog Gardens - Gardening in New England 