Organic Material is Critical to Garden Health

Keeping organic material in your soil (lawn and garden) is one of the most important aspects of good gardening. I liken it to a zero-sum game.  Every time you or your contractor removes, leaves, grass clippings, pruned branches, cut back perennials, dead annuals, you are removing organic material that, at one point, resided in your soil.  Yes, there is a lot of water in the material, but the organic material from the soil, and air, needs to be replaced.

Following are a number of ideas that you can employ, or ask your landscaper to employ, that will support a better soil for your garden, and lessen the cost of having to bring in more organic matter or replace unhappy plants.

• Every Spring, add a good quality, natural mulch to your gardens, like MadMics Mulch.  It breaks down to provide that lost organic material. Next newsletter we will talk about the huge benefits of mulch.
• When cutting down perennials in the spring, or fall, cut them up and leave the cuttings in the garden and cover with mulch.
• If you are pulling out leaves, put them in your driveway and chop them up with your lawn mower and put back in garden as a mulch.
• Take the bag off your lawn mower and mulch the grass back into the lawn.  It isn’t messy as a lot of people think.
• If you have a larger property and cut a fair bit of woody material, consider a small chipper/shredder, like this MacKissic that I have spec’d for several properties, and use the material as mulch in beds.
• When an arborist visits for tree work, have them leave some of the chips for use in your garden. This material is good for mulching around trees and bigger shrubs, not perennial or more delicate gardens.

If you don’t return organic material to your garden, then your soil has less ability to support the growth and flowering of new plants. If you want to know how much organic material is in your lawn and garden, perform a soil test. More isn’t always better, unless you are growing veggies. Vegetable gardens can be as much as 25-40% organic material, while a good lawn only needs 5-7%.  Take the time to do it right and you can significantly improve the health of your plants, lawns and vegetable gardens. It all starts with a soil test, and check the box for organic matter.